


a home in the heart

by maggierachael



Category: Wonder Woman (Movies - Jenkins), Wonder Woman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Romance, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Post-Canon, aka if i see one more smutty max lord fic i'm going to scream, and I'm fine with that, and claire is a light in the darkness, anyway claire might be my favorite oc i've ever written, honestly all i ever do is write out of spite so it tracks, i'm slowly coming to the realization that all of my writing is about processing ~trauma~, max is a sweet broken boy who thinks he is unlovable, pottery as a metaphor for healing, yes you heard that right
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-02-22
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:16:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 32,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28715628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggierachael/pseuds/maggierachael
Summary: When your hands have caused destruction, brought hell down on those you love, how are you meant to make anything with them? How are you meant to fix things, erase the way your grasp nearly cost the world its life? Are you meant to waltz around, pretending you don’t fear that everything you touch, everyone you touch, will crumble to dust?Can you ever wash those mistakes clean?The world has let Max Lord off. They have forgotten about him. But he knows what he's done. Who he is. Can one accidental meeting bring him back from that?(If anything, Claire Diggs is a stubborn woman. She's dragged herself out of hell before. What says she can't do it for him?)
Relationships: Maxwell Lord/Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 26





	1. wedging

Max felt like a bull in a china shop. Quite literally. 

He felt fragile, sitting on a stool in the middle of a ceramics workshop like he was the one meant for the kiln. He felt exposed, surrounded by parents and their children who’d already been through a firing - or were good at pretending. His back hurt. His head ached. His stomach turned in low-grade embarrassment. He felt ill, and all he was doing was watching his son play. 

That was the only thing that kept him from regretting what he was doing, sitting on a stool in some community college, under lighting that accentuated just how much luggage he carried under his eyes. It accentuated what lay under his perfectly disguised skin, what plagued him enough to feel shame sitting amongst children who would never know his name enough to care. What made him want to create a new skin from the clay in front of him, a leather hard jail cell he could crawl into and cut himself off from the world. A prison fit for a foolish Prometheus, who thought he could make man in his image to get what he wanted. 

For what man in his right mind steps down from a fight with a goddess and takes his son to a pottery class?

Surely not a smart one. 

It was the reaction he had any time he left the house. He was ruin, the steps of his journey built from the headstones of others. Any one movement felt like a bomb going off, like he was trapped in a web of trip wires and anything he did would bring the walls down around him. He was volatile, unfit for public consumption. No one in their right mind should let him be here. Should let him be anywhere. 

He watched as Alistair worked away, considering the way his own hands seemed unfit to do the same work. When your hands have caused destruction, brought hell down on those you love, how are you meant to make anything with them? How are you meant to fix things, erase the way your grasp nearly cost the world its life? Are you meant to waltz around, pretending you don’t fear that everything you touch, every _ one  _ you touch, will crumble to dust? Shake hands, hold your children, cook food, and act like they didn’t wish their universe into ruin?

Can you ever wash those mistakes clean?

Max couldn’t be sure. But nothing says “I nearly destroyed the world” like moving to the middle of nowhere Virginia. 

D.C. was too much. Too close to what he had been. Too close to a particular curator who’d promised to keep an eye on him. No, he and Alistair couldn’t stay there. It no longer felt like home. 

Nowhere else did either, but he was working on it. 

And it was a decent life, the one he’d made. Respectable, if nothing else. People had forgotten about him. Forgotten about what Black Gold had done to the world, like everything he’d done was nothing more than a collective bad dream the universe had woken up from. It was like magic, his return to anonymity, coming down on his head in a crashing, sudden heap. People knew his name - recognized it vaguely from the commercials that still ran at 3AM, remembered his face in that way people do when they can’t place something but aren’t concerned enough to worry why. People still gave him attention, the kind that isn’t quite newsworthy but isn’t quite ill-founded. 

But they didn’t know why. Didn’t care why. 

He’d gotten off scot-free. 

If you didn’t include the guilt.

But Alistair had brought the flyer home from school one day, raving about how much fun it would be to try pottery. He’d tugged on his hands and said please, please could they spend this time together. Even after everything, Alistair hadn’t forgotten about him, or stopped caring. The universe had given him that much. A reminder. A gift to teach him to do better. 

And so they went. No more excuses. No more nights bored watching TV at home. No more bare minimum. No more wishing in place of hard work. 

Not that perching like a sitting duck on an uncomfortable stool felt any better, but he was trying. He’d made the effort. That was enough. 

Right?

“Most people don’t tend to wear shirtsleeves and slacks to a pottery class.”

He glanced up, out of a stupor induced by nerves and the sound of groups of people smacking chunks of clay against a hard surface. The wild, mismatched colors of the throwing room dazed him - as did the presence of the class’s instructor, staring down at him ( _ really  _ down at him, in her stiff boots that gave her enough height to tower over him) with her brow slightly furrowed. 

She didn’t look displeased, as such, but she did seem rather confused - as she had every right to be, gazing down at the way he’d been sharply determining how best to roll up his sleeves to avoid getting (more) clay dust on them. His life had been suits and more suits since Alistair was a baby, so on they went, the simplest he had to show himself in public with. 

Success, as it turned out, didn’t afford one much time to be comfortable. And dry cleaning costs were a bitch. 

The woman, on the other hand, looked much more comfortable - dark, curly hair cut close to her ears and an oversized shirt so covered in glaze that the graphic on the front was damn near invisible. She seemed to be of the same mindset as Alistair, who’d managed to cover himself so completely in clay that Bumblebee and Optimus Prime were rendered as Picassos on his shirt. 

“Laundry costs aren’t covered in the registration fee, unfortunately.” 

She smiled gently at him, a pitying sort of smile. A smile born from the politeness that always came from second hand embarrassment. From Max, never thinking things through. From Max being the odd one out, time and again. The kind of smile that made his muscles tense, when he’d always just prefer if they’d given it to him straight. 

He’d gotten enough of those in his life. The “I’m sorry” stares and the “oh, you poor thing”s when nothing ever worked out. It’s what had led him here, past the monumental mistakes and the crashing low of coming off a high he shouldn’t have been on in the first place. His life was one long string of pity, people pulling him back from a brink he’d intentionally driven himself to. People yanking the keys out of his grasp before he could drive off the cliff entirely. 

He reminded himself gently that none of that was this woman’s fault. She didn’t know. She was just someone doing her job, and he was just another face in her day. She didn’t know what he’d done. 

He tried to shrug as nonchalantly as possible, shaking off the turning in his stomach that her smile had produced.

“Didn’t think that through, I guess.” 

He knew the smile he matched hers with was pathetic, but he threw it out anyway - some attempt at confidence, at masking the fact that he’d been lightyears away not seconds before. Whether it was successful or not, he couldn’t tell, but at least the furrow in the woman’s brow lessened, the look of confusion dampened by his refusal to provide an explanation. 

That’s what Max was good at: deflection. Getting people to ignore the things that seemed out of place. Filling the gaps with fool’s gold, even if that meant blinding them with the fraudulent final product.

How easy it was for artists to spot fakes remained to be seen. 

“I can lend you an apron,” the girl said. She seemed determined to engage with him anyhow, gesturing vaguely to a mostly empty coat rack by the drying room. “If you’re okay with having Rainbow Brite on your chest for an hour.” 

Max’s eyes followed her hand, to the space where nothing but two brightly colored pieces of cotton hung limply. He frowned, all pop culture references having diverted air traffic straight over his head the day Alistair turned nine. 

“Rainbow…?” 

“It’s her or the Care Bears.” 

The woman seemed unfazed, shrugging enough that her poncho of a work shirt slid slightly down one shoulder. 

“Usually I don’t loan out my collection to men in suits.” 

She waggled an eyebrow at him - honest to God waggled, like some kind of National Lampoon character - and nodded to his outfit, freshly stained with dark red water as Alistair took to the bowl meant for throwing with relish. The confusion had faded from her face, replaced by fresh amusement at the sight of Max struggling. Combine that with the way she barely noticed her shirt slipping down her shoulder and he could feel his face go red, with nothing in the world that could have stopped it. He prayed his complexion and the shitty lighting of the work room kept his embarrassment concealed.

“I’ll be alright, Miss…?”

“Claire,” the woman replied, still smiling. “Claire Diggs. But anyone who calls me “Miss Diggs” is asking for trouble.”

She moved to extend a hand, then decided against it, glancing down at the clay that had overtaken her hands and most of her forearms like some kind of B-movie sludge monster. She laughed at it, nodding, and Max found himself nodding along too. 

“Maxwell Lord.” 

He didn’t wait long enough for her to respond to him - for the “oh, I knew you looked familiar” comments that made him feel a bit like a zoo animal in a case. Claire didn’t seem inclined to make them, her face never moving from its neutral, friendly smile, but part of him didn’t want to risk it. Didn’t want to bear the questions about a foolish business venture that had quite nearly cost him his life. Claire seemed nice, but if he’d learned anything, it was that nice didn’t always equate to good. 

“Quite a casual work environment,” he continued, “With the first name-basis and all. Must be rewarding.”

He must’ve said something wrong -  _ wouldn’t be surprising _ \- based on the way Claire’s laughter died, her eyes flicking between Max and her own throwing clothes as she made vague shooing notions with her clay-covered hands. 

“Oh no,” she replied, suddenly hyper-aware of the way her shirt was sitting, “This isn’t my job. I just teach these for fun.”

She pinched the neck of her shoulder and moved it back into place, a content look on her face, and Max’s brow furrowed. He couldn’t imagine what could possibly endear someone to teach a bunch of strangers how to sculpt in their free time. 

Then again, he’d spent the better part of his life funding an oil cooperative. 

“You find frustrating yourself with wet dirt on a spinning wheel fun?” 

He looked down at the faded, well-loved machine at his feet, still warm from his failed attempts at wrangling it earlier. (No way dry cleaning could get  _ those _ results out.) The idea that someone - a real adult, not just a child with energy to expend - could focus enough to master it was foreign to him. He was too impatient, his brain too addicted to instant gratification to fathom that kind of patience. He was  _ more more more,  _ a by-product of the Golden Age of Success made to think he couldn’t stop at risk of everyone passing him by. Patience was a waiting game for losers, a car too empty for the HOV lane, too slow to ever win the race. There was always something else to be chased, so why sit around playing the long game?

That mindset was what had landed him here, spit out to the sidewalk like broken Walkman parts and left to cope with the empty shell. Sitting, feeling somehow lightyears behind everyone else, bested by a woman five years his junior who hadn’t even realized what she’d won. That’s what made his palms sweat and his cheeks darken, his eyes trained on the old throwing wheel as Claire chuckled. 

“You’d be surprised how often people substitute throwing for therapy, Mr. Lord.” 

She didn’t sound offended, as he’d half expected. She sounded...understanding, in a way. The way of people who don’t mind children being noisy in train cars. The way of the hand that smashes  _ stop  _ on the VCR before it fast-forwards itself to pieces. 

“And most people don’t usually spring for the wheel on their first try,” she continued. “You’re a brave man.” 

_ You wouldn’t say that if you knew me.  _

“I’ve been called stupid for less,” Max quipped, glancing back at the instructor. He could feel a twinge in his back where he’d been sitting for too long, the familiar pain of getting too old in a world that only cared if you were young. He’d regret it in the morning, he knew it, but he tried to ignore it. Shove it to the backburner like he had so many times before. 

At least it wasn’t the headaches again. 

“What do you do then?” he asked, determined to divert the conversation away from himself - another shockingly bad habit that proved useful. “When you’re not taking your anger out on slimy mush, I mean.” 

He knew he’d asked the right question the moment Claire’s face lit up despite his teasing. It was the same way Alistair’s lit up when he asked about Transformers, or the way he knew his did when someone complimented his son. It was innocent excitement - not something Max had seen much of lately. 

“I’m a librarian,” Claire said, her eyes glowing and her smile soft. “At the big place in Alexandria. Near the river.”

Max raised an eyebrow, intrigued. 

“A librarian.” 

It certainly wasn’t what he’d expected. Librarians were old - crotchety, hunched over women with glasses thicker than soda bottles and hair as blue as the sky. They chastened children for running too fast and talking too loudly, with sneers that would’ve made R.L. Stine run for the hills. Certainly they didn’t spend their free time at community colleges, hands sticky with clay and young faces smiling as they taught children how to make art out of earth. And they certainly didn’t speak to him, in his tailored suits and shoes that hadn’t set foot into a real library since college. 

But Claire only shrugged, the soft smile never leaving her face. 

“Went to school for it and everything,” she said. She looked proud, even. 

_ At least that makes one of us.  _

“Does that mean you read all the time?” 

Alistair cut in from the other side of the table, arms still elbow deep in what was either going to become an average sized dinosaur or a comically large duck. He looked up at Claire as he stuck his hands in the water bowl again, and Max’s face involuntarily twitched into a smile. A better feeling than embarrassment, to be sure. 

“When I’m not playing with clay,” Claire replied, “Yes. Do you like reading...?”

She paused, unsure of his name. Max threw it out over her shoulder.

“Alistair.”

“Alistair.” Claire nodded. Her voice sounded nice around his name. “Very nice. Do you enjoy reading, Alistair?”

Max’s son shrugged. Clearly the dino-duck was more of a priority to him. 

“Sometimes.” He squashed another bit of clay into his hands, jamming it onto what Max speculated could be a tail. “I like comic books.” 

Claire made an approving noise. 

“Me too. Do you have a favorite?“

“I like Iron Man,” Alistair said. “And Daredevil. Dad got me the action figures for Christmas.” 

The woman looked over to Max for confirmation, and he nodded, the memory of his baby’s face on a cold December morning not something he’d soon forget. She seemed to like that - or at least, he assumed she did, because when she smiled at him, all he could focus on was the fact that it felt like cannon fire directly to his chest. 

He needed sleep. 

“What if I told you you could make action figures out of this stuff?” 

Claire’s gaze shifted back to Alistair, her smile a glancing opening blow, and she leaned an elbow on the table. Stretching herself across the wet clay and sticky hardwood and countless dirty tools that stained her clothes, she grabbed a hunk of red clay from the pile Max’s son had been given. Max watched as she handled it like a baseball, a piece for target practice that she tossed between her hands - like she was ready to pitch it at his chest as an accessory to the cannon fire. 

Considering the way Alistair beamed at her words, she might as well have. 

“Really?” 

His dinosaur-gone-mutated-poultry might as well have been chopped liver, the way his attention zeroed itself in on his instructor’s hands. He watched her toss the clay back and forth, his smile wide enough to show where he’d lost a tooth two weeks before. She’d captured his interest and she knew it, nodding at him with one eyebrow cocked and her expression as excited and mischievous as his. 

“Totally.” She passed him the clay gently, watching as he looked at it in awe. “You get good enough, and I’ll have you making Hulkbuster armor within the year. If Dad’s okay bringing you every week.”

Her gaze flicked over to Max, whip-smart and expectant, and he balked. It bore into him in a way no one’s had in a long time - with some foreign entity, some flicker of hope that no one dared to have in him - and something deep in his chest told him he’d gotten himself in over his head.

But, if it was for Alistair…

Well, he’d drown himself. 

All he could manage was a curt nod, his mouth suddenly dry and completely unable to form coherent words. He had no intentions of preventing his son from returning, if Claire could keep her promise to keep him...and if he could afford it. 

He’d make it work, even if he had no idea how. He’d been a snake oil salesman for long enough that he knew all their tricks. All their ways of making ends meet with a cord two feet two short. He’d make something work. He had to. 

“Aren’t you getting bored, just sitting and watching?” 

It took Max, still deep in thought, to realize Claire had turned her attention back to him. Her gaze remained on him, that expectant look that made part of him want to crawl into his own skin and hide. She looked at him like she knew him - or wanted to. She bled with genuine interest. Or maybe she was just a particularly good teacher. 

He glanced over at his son, who didn’t seem bothered by the shift in attention. He’d happily gone back to work, determined to hone his skills enough to give Mattel a run for their money. And that was all that really mattered to Max. 

“As long as he’s happy?” He gestured to his boy, blissfully hacking away at his creation with a pottery rib. “I’m perfectly fine.”

Claire nodded.

“Spoken like a good parent. But as your instructor, I should insist. You look like you’d be good at it.”

She pinched and fiddled with the clay in her hands as she spoke, like she was daring him to have a crack at it. Inviting him in with confidence - even if Max knew it was misplaced enough to fall all the way off the table. 

“I’m not particularly artistically inclined,” he muttered. He sounded twelve again, trying to squirm his way out of chores despite being three feet away from a broom. Claire squashed the clay in her fist, and that small part of him flinched despite himself. 

“And yet you’ve let your son bring you to a ceramics class.”

She sounded amused, almost. Goading him into the response she wanted without hurting his feelings. Was that what he’d sounded like, before all of this? Prodding people into saying what he wanted, hearing not what they really desired, but what he needed?

Probably not, he figured. At least her voice didn’t sound as wheedling. 

Claire set the clay down on the tabletop, now malformed and squashed, oblivious to his inner thoughts. A roadkill side effect of being within ten feet of an artist. 

“Just try it.” She moved to stand straight, in that slow, purposeful way of anyone who worked on their feet all day. “Something small, while he’s working.”

Max watched as she stepped around the table, padding in what he now realized was bare feet towards him. Towards his personal space. Part of him wanted to back away, get up and off the uncomfortable stool, back be damned, to keep her at arm’s length. Away from his Midas touch. 

“You’re neglecting your other students, Miss Diggs.”

But she, as he’d discovered, wasn’t one to be stopped. 

“My other students have been here before,” she said. “I know them. But what I do not know is how a television personality still in his work clothes ended up at my studio in Manassas.”

Ah. So she knew. 

The name should have been a dead giveaway, but Max had foolishly assumed that her lack of a reaction to him meant she was blissfully oblivious. (Librarians and businessmen didn’t have much reason to like each other, to be sure.) That was his problem - acting on assumption, not waiting for proof that he was right about something before diving in headfirst without an oxygen tank. He’d done it before, and he was doing it now, and the way Claire smirked at him - knowing, tracing the way he shifted uncomfortably under her gaze - felt like a grater against his skin. 

“I’m a librarian. We’re curious.” She said it quietly, like they were sharing a secret. Like she wasn’t staring at a humiliated entrepreneur who’d stumbled into her life at random. “And the TV in the lobby is always on.”

She raised an eyebrow, grabbing for a lump of white from the tabletop with a knowing look on her face. It was small, no bigger than her fist, ready for someone to transform it. 

“Life is good.” 

The tiny piece made its way into Max’s hands, whether he liked it or not. Claire’s face split into a grin, an ultimatum that left him no choice. 

“But it can be better.”

She nodded once and said no more. She’d walked away before Max could process the way she’d parodied his own words, leaving him with his own script ringing in his ears. It was the aftermath of being front row at a concert, a one-woman show that left his head filled with cotton and his limbs buzzing as he clutched the sticky ball between his hands.

He looked from her to the clay and back again as Claire moved away, oblivious to the fact that she could’ve punched him in the chest and it would’ve had the same effect. 


	2. centering

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire's day job gets a little more interesting.

He had a nice nose. 

That was the first thing she’d noticed. Fucking awful hair, but a nice nose. He had a face she could’ve sculpted, all broad features and a clean profile that would translate well in clay. Not every day did faces like that come through her studio — no matter if they were attached to an infamous name or not. Claire had worked with worse, and she wouldn’t mind looking up from her wheel to see that kind of a face every week. 

What could she say? She was an artist. Artists love strong features. 

He was shockingly quiet, for a television personality. No flashy smile, no sleazy personality bleeding into everyone’s work like watery slip. Clearly he wasn’t there for the good press. No one came to Prince William County for that. If she hadn’t recognized his voice, she might not have even remembered his face from the countless commercials, the ads that played round the clock on every television within a hundred miles of DC. 

She didn’t really know what had happened with the Black Gold Cooperative. One day, the commercials were blaring inescapably on the library TV, and the next, they weren’t. Not that she’d really cared - perhaps it was one of those pop culture things that faded away into nothingness without anyone really noticing. All that would be left in a few years would be a gimmicky slogan and the vague memory of a blindingly bad dye job. 

(It really  _ was _ bad. Maybe he’d spilled a bottle of Sun-In on his head or something.)

Success or failure, he’d ended up in her studio anyway - towed along by a young boy with the same powerful features, but a much stronger grin. She liked her family nights in the studio - more attendance, more pieces to fire, more opportunities to watch someone discover how to create. It was hell for her organized brain, but it made her smile. She loved seeing kids come back week after week, learning and growing as they went. 

Most of the other parents, they guided their children, helping them through the tough bits and inevitably teasing each other by using the clay like finger paint. It was a team workshop for a reason, and Claire enjoyed watching their creations eventually come to life. 

But Maxwell Lord seemed content to sit back and watch his boy work. Not in an arrogant, “I’m too good for this” kind of way, but in a reverent one. He sat back on his stool, offering the occasional comment or encouragement as Alistair worked away with a grin on his face. Like he didn’t want to miss a single second of what his son was doing, lest something important slip through his fingers. 

He seemed more trepidatious than the boy, somehow. Afraid to touch the clay, like it’d burn through his flesh the moment it made contact. Paranoid something bad was going to happen. Afraid of failure before he’d even started. 

And Claire couldn’t stand for any of that. 

So, she had — with maybe more gusto than was strictly necessary — come on to him. Just a bit. Just to get him to loosen up. Enjoy himself for an hour outside of what was certainly a hellish public life. (She couldn’t imagine he had much time to spend with his son like that.) It was a slippery slope with his son there - who, mercifully, had not inherited the bottle blonde look - but she’d risked it anyway. At best, she’d get a phone number she’d end up tossing in the bin, and at worst, she’d have a good story for the next time she got plastered with her friends. 

“Claire, darling? There’s a man here to see you.” 

Or maybe she’d get something else entirely. 

The head librarian’s voice broke her concentration, filtering into the back office over the fan and the sound of Prince crooning about purple rain. Sylvie could’ve whispered from the other side of the building and Claire still would’ve heard her, but she knew the old woman would want to see her face when she told her. Claire, notorious bachelorette, with a man to visit her? It was as scandalous as library gossip could get in the summer. 

And scandalous it felt. Claire glanced up from her intake lists, ignoring the red pen running up and down her arms in favor of glancing up at Sylvie, head floating disembodied in the gap between the door and the wall. 

“A man?” she asked. 

Sylvie made a face not unlike that of a toddler sticking their hand into wet clay for the first time. 

“He’s got a truly atrocious haircut,” she replied. “And one of those suits that looks like it’s still got the cardboard in the shoulders. Honestly, I don’t know who looks at those and thinks they look good.” 

Claire almost wanted to laugh into her coat. 

“Did he actually ask for me, or did you notice him wandering around aimlessly and assume he was mine again?” 

This wouldn’t be the first time it had happened. True to the stereotype of being the Single Young Woman, every young man who could even slightly pass for attractive was shoved her way, guided through the entrance of Alexandria Public Library and posed with some kind of inane problem that usually ended in at least one equally inane dinner date. 

Usually, though, she didn’t already know them. And usually Sylvie didn’t insult their hair. 

“He asked when I pestered him,” the old woman responded. “Said not to tell you he was searching for you, but you know how it is.”

_ I know you’re desperate for a wedding invitation,  _ Claire thought. Sylvie frowned at the way she furrowed her brow, wrapping her arms around her chest in some attempt to process the fact that Maxwell Lord of all people had come to visit her at work. 

“Should I send him away?”

That sounded like just about the last thing the head librarian wanted to do -  _ he’s got money, dear, it’d be good for you -  _ so Claire shook her head. Honestly, even her mother had never given her this much difficulty about men. 

“No, no,” she muttered, moving to organize the papers scattered across her desk. “Just give me a minute. Five more minutes waiting won’t kill him.”

She hoped. 

Sylvie nodded, her frown dissipating now that Claire had chosen favorably. 

“He’s by the entrance, dear. Do with him what you will.” 

S he left the door open as she went back to her duties, content now that she’d be picking out a wedding outfit by the end of the week. Once she was out of earshot, Claire sighed. Clearly the flirting had been more effective that she’d hoped. 

There wasn’t much point in postponing the inevitable, lest Sylvie return and drag her by her ear out of the office. All she could do was gather her senses as best she could as shut off the radio, leaving George Michael to ponder the loss of love on his own. She snuck out of the office as silently as she could, and attempted to avoid what she knew were hopeful stares from the other women working the circulation desk as she passed by. 

An odd feeling trailed behind her as she walked, like someone had tied a book cart to her waist and made her pull it in some kind of bizarre academic olympics. A handful of rocks in her stomach, weighing her steps until she was practically crawling to the other side of the library. A train car she dragged as she passed by children in from school and the journalists drinking their tenth coffee that day. None of them could feel that weight, so Claire carried it alone.

She couldn’t put it down to looking worse than she had before. The man had seen her in a glaze-covered Arizona Cardinals shirt last week - frankly, her cardigan and faded jeans were an upgrade. She supposed it was simply the surprise of an interrupted work day, and the peril of the questions she was going to get from every member of staff the moment Lord was out the door. It wasn’t like she didn’t have friends, but no one ever made random pit stops to see her in the middle of a work day. And thus far, she’d been successfully able to keep her pottery life separate from her work life. 

_ I’m not going to complain, but... _

She heard the shuffling before she saw him, the nervous, noncommittal shift of shoes on carpet. The dead giveaway of someone who didn’t normally spend their free time in libraries. She could hear it as she approached the lobby, in the tightest caste of shelves where patrons tucked in to find adventures freshly arrived from the press. It was a perfect place for avid readers...and businessmen looking not to cause a scene. 

She found Maxwell around a corner, swaying gently in place with his focus fixed on the brand new  _ Iliad and Odyssey  _ set they’d just gotten in. It sat pride of place at patrons’ eye level, and as his hand brushed over the red leather slowly, Claire was tempted to stand back and watch him read. (If only to selfishly stare at his profile.)

“A sudden interest in ceramics  _ and _ Greek mythology? Mr. Lord, I’m impressed.” 

She leaned as nonchalantly as she could against the end of the stacks, and had to stifle a laugh in the sleeve of her cardigan as her visitor’s entire person startled noticeably. His hand dropped from the red bindings, and the casual, “I absolutely wasn’t looking for you” expression he tried to pull off failed miserably - though his suit really did look pressed within an inch of its life. 

Where words fail, she figured. 

“Word to the wise,” she said, giving him a smile she hoped would ease his nerves, “don’t tell Sylvie you’re trying to be nonchalant about talking to a girl. She’s got the biggest mouth this side of the Potomac.” 

Maxwell sputtered not unlike the engine of her ancient Pontiac, and the sight of such a silver-tongued businessman unable to form a sentence would’ve been infinitely amusing to Claire in another life. The mogul of midday commercials, reduced to babble when removed from his home turf. Imagine that. 

“I wasn’t trying to—“

Claire cut him off before he dug himself a deeper hole. 

“It’s a forty minute drive from Manassas, Mr. Lord.”

_ No one makes that for a couple of books. _

To his credit, her visitor’s engine had turned over and he avoided sputtering again. In fact, it revved enough that it backfired, loud and punctual in the quiet and secrecy of the library stacks. 

“Max.” The word came out as a  _ smack,  _ a single drumbeat Claire felt to her toes. “Please.” 

He said it with such conviction that Claire couldn’t bring herself to argue. It seemed only fair, after she’d offered her own first name to him. 

_ Max. _

She liked that name. It fit him. (Much better than “Mr. Lord”, anyway.) And some twisted part of her enjoyed being on a first name basis with someone like him - this Kroger brand Simon Le Bon that had stumbled out of a television set and into her life.

Sylvie would kill her if she didn’t get his number at this rate. 

“Of course.” 

She nodded once, half an affirmation and half an attempt to bring his shoulders down from where they rested against his ears. 

“I’m flattered, Max. Really. Not many men go out of their way to chase down the woman who bullied them into fiddling with wet dirt.”

It didn’t quite bring his shoulders down from cruising altitude, but his senses returned to him a bit - his eyes lost their glazed look and his expression returned to something akin to human, rather than startled alleycat. 

“I wouldn’t say bullied,” he reassured gently. “More ‘aggressively encouraged’.” 

It wasn’t quite the swooning charisma everyone seemed to expect of him, but it was a quick recovery. Claire tried not to read too much into the gentleness of his tone, the clear attempt at not being overly forward - for all she knew, he was just particularly aware of the no shouting rule the building was strict on. 

“That’s my speciality.”

She should put that on her resume. 

“While you’re here,” she continued, eager to keep Max from stalling out again, “Can I help you look for anything? I’m pretty sure my boss already thinks I’m making out with someone in the stacks, so I might as well do my actual job while I’m at it.” 

She had a future in air traffic control, if the way Max’s shoulders raised in tandem with his eyebrows was any indication. Either that or a horror movie actress, considering her track record of scaring him. 

“Oh, no, I…” The sputtering started again, the backfire of a faulty tail pipe that left him lost for words. “I just wanted to, ah....thank you. For last week. For a nice time.” 

_ A nice time.  _ Claire practically snorted. The suave charm of Max Lord on TV definitely didn’t transfer over to real life. 

But it was sweet. And she, embarrassingly, had a sweet tooth. 

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Clearly I must’ve done something right, for Mr. Big Shot to come all the way here just to tell me that.”

She saw something flicker in his eyes, but it was gone before she could chase it down. Before she could tease it out like she’d somehow teased his interest in her. 

“Alistair’s with his mother next week,” he said by way of explanation. “And 95 isn’t as pitiful on Wednesdays as it usually is. Seemed reasonable enough.”

He had that odd tilt to his voice that she recognized from home - that voice you heard in every Tucson bodega that told you the English language wasn’t their first. The voice she heard in buses in and out of DC, the mark of a transplant finding a way in their new home.

It was that voice alone that kept her from calling his bullshit. Highway 95 was hell every day of the week and Claire knew it. No one dared enter Alexandria on their lunch hour, not without a certain amount of swearing and probably more than one bumped curb. But she let it slide, if only for his sake and the look on his face that told her would’ve said it regardless. 

_ Nonchalant, you are not, Mr. Lord.  _

“Mm. Fair enough.” She ran a hand along the edge of the shelving unit and smiled. “‘S a shame we won’t see you next week. You looked like you were in your element.”

Max scoffed. 

“Hardly.” 

His eyes looked far away, the expression she’d seen on every man who refused to admit that embarrassment was a feeling more than just women experienced. He seemed to wear that expression a lot, for a man who wore power suits more expensive than her monthly paycheck. Or maybe she was just misjudging the size of his ego. 

“I think you’re selling yourself short.” 

Her fingers trailed along the shelving units, past new mysteries and hardbound cookbooks and colorful children’s board books as she sought to bring Max’s expression back to shore. She really did believe what she said; people were too quick to judge themselves, too quick to decide they were no good when something didn’t work out for them the first time around. She’d watched Max fiddle with the clay she’d given him. He’d blocked out the world, all of his nervous energy directed to the task at hand - even if it had only turned into a tiny snowman that had shattered in the heat of the kiln. 

He had the focus, she thought. He just had to work for it. 

“If you ever have the inclination to try again,” she suggested, “I do a couple of free classes for cardholders here every month.” 

Okay, yes. Maybe she was pushing her work agenda. But with the way Max’s attention zeroed in on her, she was glad she had.

“Are you just trying to cajole me into getting a library card?” he asked. Claire shrugged. 

“‘Cajole’ isn’t the word I’d use,” she replied, “But bonus Scrabble points for you. If you do, though, it means I’ll have your number on file.”

Max’s expression snapped back from its faraway journey at her words, quick enough that he’d stunned himself into a concussion of his own making. Claire watched as he balked at what she’d insinuated, and despite the fear that his engine might die again, she laughed. 

“I’m kidding, Max. But it might be nice for Alistair. I’ve got a sick comic book hookup.”

She gestured to a shelf just by her knee, filled with all the trade paperbacks she’d just finished shelving that day. With one hand, she pulled a volume off the shelf and admired it - the brand new Iron Man collection every kid in the county was lusting after. It was bait and she knew it...but it was effective bait all the same. 

“And who knows? Maybe reading is more your speed than sculpting.” She passed the book to him, noting the way he gripped it like it would shatter if he didn’t. “You seem like a Tom Clancy guy to me.”

The face he pulled was sour, a distinct look halfway between confusion and revulsion, and Claire couldn’t help but grin. Clearly she’d been wrong.

“I’m determined to find something you’re interested in, Big Shot.” She raised an eyebrow at him, her best imitation of the stern old woman she’d one day become. “No one walks into my library and walks out still bored.” 

“If they’ve come across you,” Max replied, “I doubt anyone ever has.” 

His expression recovered, and he smiled - a soft, timid thing, but genuine nonetheless - and something in Claire’s stomach dropped. 

Normally, flirting made her stomach turn. It made her head hurt and her skin itch. It was a completely inane effort, a last ditch to get laid when your personality isn’t enough. Men trying to be charming came off as smooth as a cheese grater against her brain.  _ Her  _ trying to be charming made her want to jump off a cliff. It wasn’t something that was conducive to success in her eyes. 

But she let Max get away with it. She let him look at her like that, walk into her life out of nowhere and disturb the perfectly nice day she was having. She let him stay, despite his terrible hair and how jumpy he was and the fact that it broke all of her rules about keeping work away from fun. 

_ Just this once _ , her brain said, even though they both knew that was a complete lie.  _ Just to get Sylvie to shut up. Just to get through the work day a little bit faster.  _

Maybe this was adequate revenge for what she’d done to him last week. Maybe she was being stupid. Reading into things that weren’t there. Maybe she’d finally gone insane. 

“I’m an unmarried woman in her thirties who works at a library,” she said. “It’s a more difficult sell than you’d think.”

Maybe she was just selfishly enjoying something, for once in her life. 

“Come on. Let’s get you that card.”

She couldn’t have sounded more eager if she’d grabbed his hand and dragged him behind her, the way she spun on her heel without waiting for him to respond. Not enough of her cared if she made an ass of herself trodding off without him following - even though it probably should have - so off she went, out of the aisle and through the stacks she knew like the back of her hand. 

(She might have smiled when she heard the sound of leather soles shuffling against the carpet behind her.)

She felt like Orpheus leading Eurydice - though, perhaps farther  _ into _ hell rather than out of it, depending on your view of her situation. She didn’t glance back, some instinct in her gut keeping her back straight and her feet moving, all the way back to where she’d started at the circulation desk. Someone had turned her radio back on, and she could hear Duran Duran coming from the office as she slid back around the edge of the desk. 

_ I tell you, somebody's fooling around with my chances on the danger line... _

“My turnover rates have been shit,” she said jokingly as she situated herself. “Sylvie’s going to love you for this.”

_ She already does, but you don’t need to know that. Or why. _

She leaned over the circulation desk, close enough now that she could see where the edge of his bottle blonde met the real him, that inch or two that gave away who he really was underneath. He had nice eyes, she thought. Pretty brown ones, to go with the nice nose. She hadn’t expected that of him. 

“Fill this out for me, mm?”

She pulled a paper from one of the many stacks littering the surface of the desk and passed it to Max. A sickeningly yellow thing, she could’ve read the words “CARD APPLICATION” printed on it from across the building as he took it from her hands, not bothering to lean away from the woman who’d teased him, prodded him with questions, and was now unquestionably in his personal space. Claire half-expected him to pull stupidly expensive eyeglasses out of a hidden suit pocket, but he accepted the paper without flourish as he reached for one of the pens on the desk.

“Make sure you put Alistair’s name on as well,” she said distractedly, “So he can come ‘round without you.”

_ I’d prefer it if he didn’t, but... _

Max said nothing, the maraca-like sound of pens on chains filling the silence for him. It was a tiny symphony that Claire enjoyed all to herself, the scratch of pen to hard cardstock music to any librarian’s ears. If nothing else, she’d given a kid access to a whole new world, a world she’d hid her own childhood self in when things got tough. She’d handed over the key to the wardrobe, pulled the manhole cover off the rabbit hole. If she never saw Max again, at least she’d have that. 

Nonetheless, it was a short symphony, a single movement in a concerto that Max finished as he returned the paper to her, still silent. He was a good conductor, and Claire knew she’d be singing it for weeks - she knew it the moment he smiled at her before she turned away. 

It was a broken record in her head as she dipped back into her office, to the massive monster that printed out library cards with what she imagined was the noise equivalent of standing in the middle of a Dulles runway. It was the brass section the song was missing as she translated Max’s handwriting to print, a wind tunnel-like flute solo as it embossed “MAXWELL LORD” in bold typeface - a composer she could easily stack next to Salieri. 

_ Maybe I’m finally turning into Sylvie, _ she thought as she pulled the card from the machine. _ Just like I threatened my mother I would.  _

At least Claire had better hair. 

When she returned from the depths of the office, possibly half-deaf, Max was standing at the counter expectantly, the shuffle of his heels on carpet greeting her like a doorbell. He looked so out of place, all starched collars and pressed lines against the wornness of her workplace, the softness of well-loved pages and the way even the librarians seemed to blur around the edges if you looked at them too long. He was an anomaly straight out of the Sears catalog. 

Claire kind of liked it. 

“You can use this at any of the libraries in Alexandria,” she said, passing the fresh, crisp new card over to him. “Sign the bit on the back and you’ll make me extra happy.”

She tried not to think about the way Max’s entire body seemed to react to her comment, instead focusing on the fresh movement of pen-maracas as she slid the borrower card from the Iron Man book. She could hear them scritching as she leaned over for the stamp, her eye catching something else hiding in the cubby shelves as she did. The librarian’s equivalent of something cheap on the checkout rack at a grocery store. 

A book came up with her when she stood, a copy of  _ The House on Mango Street  _ that glowed bright orange against Max’s dark suit as she slapped it on top of the Iron Man book. Not strictly the most well-advised idea, but the more she worked to look like she was doing her job, the less shit she’d get later - though she was certain the grin she gave Max would leave Sylvie reeling for weeks. 

“Had it on the pile for myself,” she said. “But you might like it. Freebie, on me.”

Max glanced up from signing the library card, and she watched as his eyebrows slowly slid up towards the artificial edge of his Bottle Blonde persona. 

(She’d be lying if she said it wasn’t a little bit funny.) 

“This is a library, Miss Diggs.” His eyes flicked from the book to her, and Claire noticed how long they lingered before they moved back to the book. “I don’t think that really—”

“I told you, Big Shot.” Claire put a hand on top of the pile, drumming her fingers as she felt her grin grow. “I’m determined to keep you interested.”

_ In the book. Definitely in the book. _

“But keep calling me Miss Diggs and I might think you’ve got something against me. You make me sound like my grandma.”

Max raised an eyebrow, and she thought she could see the ghost of a smile forming on his face as he looked her up and down. 

“You  _ are  _ standing behind a counter wearing glasses and a cardigan,” he said slowly. “One might find it easy to jump to conclusions.”

Okay, maybe he was smoother than she’d given him credit for. 

She prayed the harsh LEDs of the overheads would wash out the flush in her face. 

“He grumps about at my pottery studio,” she mumbled, grabbing the stamp for his borrower cards, “He shows up at my job and calls me old...not a great strategy for impressing a girl, I’ve got to say.”

Max made a noncommittal noise, watching her hands move in a silent conductor’s wave. 

“I have a feeling you’re harder to impress than most women, Claire.”

“There’s the money.”

She’d unintentionally ignored her own workplace’s volume rule, the words coming out in a rush in what might as well have been a megaphone placed against her lips. She could feel glares coming from the office already, but her ignorance of them was deliberate, her eyes never leaving Max’s as she pulled the borrower cards from his books with practiced ease. She hefted the card stamp like Thor with his hammer, and smacked it down onto the cards with a bit more fervor than was strictly necessary - the world’s greatest rhythm instrument, drums be damned. It added to their growing symphony as she scribbled out a checkout receipt, sliding it into Mango Street and tucking the borrower cards away like some kind of well-kept secret, just between the two of them. Something to be discovered later, when the both of them could breathe and Claire didn’t feel like her face was the color of a Red Hot. 

“Now take your books and get out, before my coworkers start thinking we’re engaged because I made eye contact for twenty seconds.” 

She said it loud enough for the glaring sets of eyes to hear her - whether that was to antagonize them or to prove she could actually talk to men, she hadn’t decided. At least Max seemed in on the joke. 

“Much less fun than working at a pottery studio, mm?” 

His hands closed around the books, pulling them towards him until the covers were flush to his chest. Claire could see where a tiny Iron Man poked out above his hand, and she shrugged. 

“It’s got its perks.” 

It was true - negging old women not included. 

(Well, only some of the time. They were sweet.)

She hefted her monster of a stamp back to where it belonged, and the group of people milling about around the desk didn’t go unnoticed as she tried to seem like she was doing said perk-filled job. It didn’t go unnoticed for Max, either, and Claire was convinced Fred Astaire would’ve been jealous of the shuffle he’d managed to perfect in her presence. 

“See you around?”

He looked as stupidly hopeful as her nieces on a Saturday morning, and she was glad he’d given her an out, or she could’ve stared at that all day. 

“I’d hope so, Max.” 

She flashed a grin she knew was nothing but shit-eating at him, leaning over to tap the part of his chest covered by freshly bound hardbacks. 

“You’ve got books due.”

Good lord, she wasn’t turning into Sylvie. She was turning into her  _ mother.  _

She could feel the onslaught of attention coming, hear the shuffle of worn Mary Janes as her coworkers swarmed in to find out who that nice young man was and what he wanted with their dear little Claire. She could sense it like a typhoon, the tide slipping away with Max as he backed away from the desk, none the wiser to the fact that she’d already waded in up to her ankles as he turned to leave. She knew she wouldn’t get anything done for the rest of the day, but some part of her didn’t care. Some part of her was too focused on Max, on the way he clutched those books to his chest and the way she could tell with eerie certainty that that wouldn’t be the last time she saw him. 

She pretended not to notice him glance back at her on his way out. 


	3. coning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max makes a phone call.

_ call me if you want another crack at the throwing wheel. _

_ —claire  _

It took Max five days to find the note Claire had left on his library receipt. 

Five whole days, staring at the book he’d left on his kitchen counter. Five strangely agonizing days, not daring to open the red and orange cover, letting empty bottles and junk mail and more than one action figure pile up around it. Five days of forgetting, of being too tired or too busy or too damn scared to pick up the book she had chosen for him. Five days of not knowing what she’d done. 

Five days was nothing in the grand scheme of things, but it had all the ability to feel like forever. 

He blamed finally needing to unearth it on checking the due date. Pretended that pushing past credit card offers and bank notes and a rather squat Incredible Hulk was on Alistair’s behalf, a need to know when they’d have to swap out Iron Man for someone else. Pretended that the little house on Mango Street hadn’t finally piqued his curiosity - much the opposite of Alistair. 

He’d loved the book, of course. Read it five times over before the week was even out. He’d pointed out the best bits to Max, regaling him with stories of Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic over dinner, while his father secretly stewed over what the hell he was supposed to be doing with his life. It was like Claire had read his mind from miles away, given him something he could drag everywhere. Show to his friends. Be proud of. He looked like a new boy, all smiles and excitement and a passion for something, even if it was men in metal suits. 

And he hadn’t even complained when Max had told him it was due. 

Not that Max was looking forward to returning it. Of course not. Of course seeing Claire’s handwriting in his own book hadn’t spiked his blood pressure. Hadn’t made his stomach flip and stars enter the edge of his vision. Of course he hadn’t read and re-read the tiny, scribbled note a thousand times, hadn’t tucked it in his pocket, hadn’t carried it around for two days hoping that the next time he passed a payphone he’d have built up the nerve to call her. 

Of course not. That would be desperate. 

So really, he had no excuse to be sitting on his couch on a Thursday night, trying to come up with some sad excuse about an overdue library book just to justify dialing the number in his hands.

_ It’s just polite,  _ he told himself, staring at the receiver in his hand like he’d willingly grabbed a live bomb.  _ So she doesn’t think you’re ignoring her.  _

Not that she probably cared. For all he knew, she’d forgotten him, just like the rest of the world. Maxwell Lord, a castoff of American phenomena relegated to the same space of mind as  _ Struck by Lighting  _ and the Bee Gees. Another card in her library’s catalogue, another freak incident of nature that would leave her mind as swiftly as he had come. 

But she’d left a reminder. A bookmark between the pages of her life, to be picked up by someone else, completely out of her control. She’d given him a number he’d had memorized before he’d even braved picking up the phone - a number that was inviting him, in terrible, half-legible script to do so. Inviting Max back into Claire’s life, despite the spectacle he’d made of himself a week ago. Despite the fact that he’d waltzed into her life in shirtsleeves and slacks, as out of place as he could possibly be. Despite the fact that, for all intents and purposes, Claire didn’t need to give him the time of day. 

But needs are far different than wants. Max knew that all too well. 

He hadn’t called a girl since...lord, was it Alistair’s mother? Had it been that long? He assumed as much, given the way he stared at the phone cord like it might grow fangs and bite him. Was Claire serious? Did she actually want to talk to him, or was she being literal? Was she just trying to sucker him in, convince another member of the community to take a chance at what she loved? 

He didn’t know what the rules were, and he’d been too fond of breaking them in the past. Divorce and custody hearings and the desire to rule the corporate world had muddled his mind, blocked out the idea of ever inviting anyone else in. Made him hard to everyone else, to the idea of ever trusting anyone the way he had before. His nerve endings were sharp, knives facing outward as well as in. Heads mounted on the castle wall, to warn anyone - any woman - who came close:  _ This is what you’re getting into. Beware. _

Either way, he was fairly certain phone etiquette had changed since 1972. 

For all his age, for all of the years he’d practiced being charming in front of a camera, he had nothing. No mettle, no reckless abandon, no surety that anything he said would make someone like him. No knowledge that he could be anything more than a fool disguising himself with expensive suits. Hell, he’d had a child with the last woman he’d talked to, and she’d divorced him. He had nothing to prove that what he wanted to do wouldn’t be a complete disaster. 

_ You could’ve died two months ago _ , he thought to himself _. You should be able to dial a goddamn phone.  _

“Daddy?”

Max’s self-obsessed reverie snapped like a too-tight rubber band, a piece of elastic that smacked him in the face as a voice drew him out of his head. His head snapped up from the phone, pulled up by some distant paranoia from a time long gone. Some distant feeling that seeded guilt into his blood like cocaine. 

He was met with the sight of Alistair, awake far past his bedtime and practically engulfed by the set of pajamas Max had just bought him. He stood in the doorway of the den, tiny shoulders haloed by the light of the hall beyond. Max always left that light on for him. It killed the electric bill, but he knew how scary it was to seek out comfort in the dark - to stumble into the realm of your brain’s shadowy nightmares all alone. How scary it could be not knowing if you’d find solace at all. He was right down the hall, but no child ever deserved to make that trek of fear. Particularly not his own. 

So, he left the light on. A reminder that he was always there to scare the demons away. No matter what.

“What are you doing?” 

His voice was tiny against the hollow silence of the den. It bounced off the walls, the lack of real furniture - the lack of it really being lived in - giving it an echo. Max’s chest tightened, the sight of his boy disturbed enough to startle him. 

“Just making a phone call, baby.” His voice sounded impossibly loud, far more confident than he felt. “Did I wake you up?”

Alistair shook his head, thick bangs shuffling to obscure tired eyes. He brought a hand up to rub one, the sleeve of his pajama shirt visibly rumpled. 

" Nightmare.” 

The word no parent ever wanted to hear. His father’s heart lurched. 

“Can I sit with you?”

Alistair glanced at the couch where Max was seated - a huge, grey thing that swallowed you up the minute you sat in it. All the more comfortable for sleepy little boys. 

“Of course.” Max nodded, not even having to think. “Come here.”

A better parent would have taken him back to bed, tucked him in and reminded him that he had school in the morning, but Max couldn’t bear it. Couldn’t bear the idea that something had scared his boy - even something imaginary. The idea of it scared him half to death. Made him want to hold little Alistair and never let go. 

So he discarded the phone, letting the receiver drop to the side table as he opened his arms wide enough for Alistair to crawl in. He was such a tiny thing, his boy, all skin and bones as he clambered up into Max’s lap, curling up against his chest like a cat until he was comfortable. His head rested against Max’s bicep, and the weight of him was comforting - Max finally felt like his heart  _ wasn’t  _ going to beat its way out of his chest. 

“Are you alright?”

He brought his arms into a cage around Alistair, one hand moving to stroke his hair as he settled in. He knew the real answer already - the poor thing had trouble sleeping through the night, especially after everything. He imagined the nightmares weren’t much different from his; alone, away from those he loved, in the middle of something monstrous that he had no way to control. Fear. Panic. Not understanding how this had happened.

Max deserved those nightmares. Deserved his punishment, the eagles pecking out his liver while he slept. Deserved the never-ending cycle, the terror and the fear any time he closed his eyes. Deserved to relive everything he’d done, again and again. 

But his baby didn’t. 

“Mm-hmm.”

Alistair nodded, his nose rubbing against Max’s faded sleep shirt. He was half-asleep already, his voice far away. Waiting patiently at the terminal back to dreamland as he nestled into his father - into the arms that would protect him from anything, real or otherwise. 

Those arms rocked him back and forth, coaxing him back to the peaceful sleep he deserved as Max gazed down at him. Such a brave boy. So willing to bear nightmares without help. So willing to stand by him, even though he had, in one way or another, caused them. So willing to love him, despite all his glaring flaws. 

“Good.”

He smiled, for all that it was worth in the dim light of the den. 

“Because your old man might not be able to do this much longer.”

He ruffled his boy’s hair, and Alistair made a noncommittal noise, the words barely breaking through the veil of sleep that was already settling back over him. It was a lie, out and out; he’d be eighty and hunched over before he stopped doing this, stopped offering a place for his son to rest when he needed it. Alistair could be forty and full grown (as much as that scared him) and he’d be there, on that rundown old couch, arms wide open and waiting. 

They’d have to break his back before he’d stop doing it. That much he knew. 

“You’re getting so big,” he muttered, though he knew Alistair was already fast asleep. Back to dreamland, the monsters and the demons scared back to their hideaways. “You’re going to need to stop growing, sweetheart.”

_ Because my heart might not be able to take it.  _

Alistair heard none of his father’s reverie, none of his strange, nostalgic, heartbreaking lullaby. His breathing had evened out, and he was still - vastly different from the squirming, excitable boy Max knew during the day. He was gone to the world, mercifully. And with Max there, hopefully he’d stay that way until morning. 

With his back already - inevitably - going stiff, Max considered his options, still running a hand through Alistair’s hair. He could carry him back to bed, and get some sleep himself. He could stay here for a while, making sure Alistair was fast asleep before he dared to move. He could give up, and try to sleep himself, hoping he’d hear his alarm from the bedroom in the morning and that his back wouldn’t suffer. Or…

He glanced down at the phone, receiver still off the hook where he’d left it. He could hear the gentle dial tone, the bassline of a song that he somehow knew already. It was steady, like the weight of his boy on his chest. Constant. Promising. 

He couldn’t keep scaring his baby’s demons away if he couldn’t face his own himself. 

The phone had gone cold in the time he’d comforted Alistair, now icy and slick as he carefully retrieved it without waking the sleeping babe in his arms. It scared him, like the shock of sticking your head into cold water, but he persevered, the feeling of Alistair’s steady breathing keeping his own chest from constricting like a deflated balloon. 

With an arm still around his boy, he was forced to hold the phone with his shoulder, the red plastic threatening to fuse to his temple as he pressed it to his ear. The other hand dialed haphazardly without looking, the pad under his hand like hot coals as he finally brought himself to do what he’d been trying to. He couldn’t put a name to what it was, what pushed him to move past the dial tone, but it set something alight deep in his chest. Under the muscle and past the bone, nestled in the space between his lungs and his heart, where he couldn’t put it out. 

The dial tone ceased as his hand left the keypad, and he couldn’t have breathed if he tried as he listened to it ring. 

And ring. 

And ring. 

And ring. 

Somewhere between the seventh and the eighth tone, Max was beginning to believe the universe was taunting him. 

“Hello?”

The voice was loud in the receiver, like the person on the other end was shouting in his ear. It hit him like a sack of bricks, the petrifying hold tone replaced with a human voice. A person on the line he had to contend with. Talk to, like he wasn’t sweating bullets. 

Perhaps it would have been better if she hadn’t answered. 

“Claire?”

His throat felt like he’d swallowed sand, and the word came out as a croak. A syllable that barely sounded like her name, let alone like anything resembling composure. He might as well have hung up then and there, for all he’d managed to endear himself with - if the person on the other end was even her. Alistair stirred in his arms, and he seriously contemplated slamming the phone then and there. 

“Max? Hi!” 

The voice pierced Max’s ear again, in that way that made him think she had her own receiver pressed flush to her face. It was certainly Claire - no one else said his name the way she did. Firm. Confident. Like the first chord of a Bowie song. The one that Alistair played over and over on the cassette player, no matter what anyone said. 

_ I just met a girl named Blue Jean... _

Either way, the sound of his name coming out of her mouth made something in his chest seize, constrict around his heart like a not unfamiliar lasso. She sounded out of breath, like she’d run to the phone away from something else. Like he’d interrupted her, which only made the vice in his heart more tense. Had she been crying? Working? Engaged in...well,  _ something _ else?

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know which one. 

“Have I caught you at a bad time?”

The croak was better, though Max figured he could still give Kermit a run for his money, the way he sounded utterly nothing like himself. Or maybe this was him - the stripped down version that lived inside, past everything he’d taught himself and rehearsed and strived to maintain in front of others. Maybe the real him  _ was  _ desperate. 

But if he was, Claire didn’t seem to mind. 

She sighed gently, a happy, contented sound, and Max could feel the universe take its foot off his chest - or at least its heel. He hated the term “music to one’s ears”, but for all he cared, that sound might as well have been a symphony. 

“No, no! Of course not.” She was the Flight of the Bumblebee, words spilling out over one another, breath too slow to keep up with her thoughts. “I was just...wrestling with a particularly large bit of clay, as it happens. And that’s saying something, for my size.” 

She had one of those smiles Max could hear through the phone - the same infectious energy she’d bled like mad the first time he’d met her. The energy Alistair had when he told Max stories, spouting words because she took joy in them, no matter what he thought. An energy that he was shocked she had this late at night - enough to be wrestling with clay when he felt like he could fall asleep sitting up. 

“My sister-in-law’s paying me to hand-build a fountain for her garden,” she continued, lost in her train of thought. “Massive bastard, as it turns out. Woman wants swans for her fountainheads. Clearly she’s never met the ones on the Mall.”

She laughed at her own joke, and Max could feel the heat of a chuckle bubble up in his own chest. He kept it contained, if only for Alistair’s sake, but it warmed his heart like a fire, a starter stoked by the tone in her voice as she continued talking. 

“I don’t suppose you’re calling for another crack at the wheel, hmm?” she asked. As ever, Max couldn’t tell if she was taking a swing at him. He sighed. 

“Well, that  _ is _ what you left the number for.” 

Claire hummed. 

“Brave man.” 

_ You keep using that word _ , Max thought to himself.  _ I don’t think it means what you think it means. _

He hadn’t  _ really  _ called for that. About the last thing he wanted to do was sit down at that wheel again. Make a fool of himself in front of a woman who’d certainly seen enough of that for her liking already. He wasn’t that kind of person, made with the focus and the determination to see something like that through. His hands shook. His mind raced. He leaped before he looked, acted before he planned. Took a running jump and fell hard and fast.

That was his role in the story. Court jester. Royal fool. Man whose downfall made everything else look fine.  _ Schadenfreude.  _ Dramatic irony. Comedic relief, on the darkest, most bitter level. 

He wasn’t made to create. Men like him were only built to destroy. 

“I haven’t called too late, have I?” 

Clearly he hadn’t, if she was up fighting with clay at this hour, but part of him still worried. Was still paranoid that she had a time frame for dealing with men like him. Strictly for working hours, he was. Not to be fuddled with when your muscles were tired, when you wanted to shut your brain off and ignore the irritating parts of the world. Surely Claire wouldn’t want him, whispering and exhausted, at the end of a long day. 

“Of course not, Max.”

Claire’s response was quick, hard and fast the same way she’d sounded when she’d picked up. Not at all what he’d expected. 

“I’d been waiting for you to call, actually.” There was that happy sigh again, like she was still catching her breath. “I was hoping you weren’t the kind of person who tosses your receipts.”

_ I’d been waiting for you.  _

Michael fucking Jackson could’ve walked through Max’s door and it wouldn’t have had the same effect. 

“I’m very careful about due dates.” 

Not that that made him any smoother, of course. 

“Didn’t want some woman in a cardigan calling day and night,” he continued, “Yelling at me because I accidentally held a book hostage. Makes it easier if I jump the gun.”

If you could call two days of flaking out and forty-five minutes of mental torment easy, that is. But she didn’t need to know that. 

“He’s cute  _ and  _ he cares about due dates?” Claire made a slow whistling noise over the phone. “My coworkers are going to love you.”

If anything, Max was glad Claire couldn’t see his face. He could’ve been standing in front of a furnace, for all the way it felt at the moment. Even without Alistair on his chest, he’s certain he couldn’t have moved if he tried. 

“A high honor.” 

God, he could’ve outdone Jim Henson at this rate. 

Claire chuckled on her end, and the phone line distorted it. Morphed it into something else. Something lovely, compared to his frog squeak. 

“You spoke to me for more than fifteen seconds.” she said, “And you don’t explicitly look like a serial killer. I’m half-convinced Sylvie’s picked out our wedding colors already.”

“As long as there’s no gold.”

A bad joke, one Claire would never understand. A reference to a memory, just starting to fade at the back of Max’s mind. Just starting to lose the sting of remembrance. Words spouted off, a sign of finally falling into a rhythm, without realizing no one else could hear the tune. 

It took him more than a few seconds to realize what he’d said. 

Claire didn’t respond, confused or not, and they fell silent. The phone line crackled between them, angry they’d put it out of use. It simmered gently, against the gentle breathing of Max’s boy and the woman on the end of the line. The woman who was not his, but who was beginning to feel like it. A part of his life, at the very least. Even if all she did was stand there.

Whether it was comfortable, or because Max had jumped the shark so effectively he could’ve been in  _ Jaws _ , he didn’t know. But it was calming, that silence. An odd kind of white noise, like the sound of the ocean just beyond the planks of a boardwalk. A gentle roar, just out of reach. A sound he could burrow into, to escape the sheer stupidity of what he’d just said. 

“So why  _ did _ you call?” 

The moment shattered like safety glass, Claire’s voice gently creeping back in to nag at Max’s brain. It was softer this time. More considered. Like she’d been as afraid of ruining the silence as he had. 

“Don’t worry.” There was that tone again, that smile. He could almost see the way her eyes went wide as she did. “I know you’re not overly fond of that wheel.”

Claire never seemed to step before Max was ready. Didn’t question who he was, or what made him act the way he did. She always seemed perfectly content to hover at the edges of his space, to take what he was willing to give her, piece by piece. She wanted to know, but only if he said yes. Only if he reciprocated.

Like she’d said. She was just…curious. 

And she was making Max that way too. 

“I don’t  _ hate  _ it.” He did, but that was beside the point. “And that seemed as good an excuse as any to talk to you. Given I don’t have anything due for a while yet.” 

He tried to be clever, tried to make something sly out of it, but he could hear the words fall flat as they left his mouth. Could hear them bounce against the receiver, an echo in an empty auditorium as Claire went silent again. He couldn’t be curious the way she could, make it seem so nonchalant - like he wasn’t hanging on this woman’s every word like a child frantically clinging to monkey bars. He was only good at charming, the sickening sweetness of falsity that convinced people to trust him, but not to let him in. Claire deserved better than that. 

“You don’t have to have an excuse to talk to me, Max.”

She sounded sincere. Something in Max’s chest flinched. 

_ Yes, but if I don’t, I’m not sure I’d survive the conversation. _

“What can I say?” He fidgeted in his seat, careful not to disturb Alistair, but eager to escape the sound of his own voice. “You’re quite a persuasive teacher.”

She laughed, and it sounded like church bells. Wind in the trees on a new summer’s day. 

“My mother always told me I’d make a great car salesman,” she mused. “But ending up elbow-deep in wet dirt isn’t for everyone. Especially not men in shirtsleeves.” 

“I’ll have you know,” Max replied, “I’m wearing nothing of the sort.”

His sleep clothes were about the only thing he owned that  _ weren’t  _ shirtsleeves, but still. The less someone could tease him for, the better. 

“Mmm, he’s improving.” Claire clicked her tongue, and Max could feel someone turn up the heat in his face. “I’d ask what it is you’re wearing instead, but that might make it weird.”

“No weirder than a strange man calling you to talk about pottery in the middle of the night.”

“It’s eleven o’clock, Max.”

Alistair fussed on top of Max, shifting in his sleep. He made an effort to adjust, leaning back to keep the receiver from spitting static in his son’s ear - no need to wake him again. He settled back in, knees tucked against Max’s own, and a wash of relief passed over his father. Eleven it might be, but he had a boy to take care of. 

Claire made a fussing noise herself, something between a scoff and gently muttering to herself. She was up for much different reasons than him - he could imagine a table of tools set out in front of her, half-wet clay starting to sag as he distracted her from her work. 

“But if you want to talk pottery,” she said, the line sputtering for a moment, “Why don’t you come ‘round to the studio?” 

It wasn’t the question Max had expected, but it made something light up in his chest anyway. Start pinging like the pinball machines at the arcade, all bright lights and ringing noises and klaxons loud enough to take your eardrums out. Her question pulled at him the same way her number had; terrifying in the same way as bungee jumping, or skydiving, or stepping into oncoming traffic. Equal opportunities for success or failure. 

“Your poor Frosty’s in bits,” she said, “But maybe I can teach you a little Christmas magic and we can bring him back to life. If you actually do care about the wheel, that is.”

He’d completely forgotten about the snowman, to be honest. He’d constructed it half-distracted, in the daze of Claire looking at him and deciding he was something more than the next loser on the street. Just three lumps of clay, rolled up between hands that had, until that point, done nothing but tear down. Touch, grab, take away. The hands of a modern Prometheus, all the way back to the start with his clay. 

“I’m not sure snowmen are built to survive this weather, Miss Diggs.”

“Someone’s never heard of Christmas in July.”

She scoffed, a tiny, amused noise. She always seemed to sound that way. Intrigued. Unperturbed, no matter what spilled out of his mouth. 

“What did I tell you about that name?”

It barely sounded like an admonishment - more like a game, really. As if she were quizzing him. Challenging him to keep up with her. Max shrugged, oblivious to the fact that she couldn’t see him. 

“Just doing what my mother taught me,” he said. Claire scoffed. 

“Whatever you say, Big Shot.”

The nickname struck paydirt in his chest; an oil line that spurted up, filling his ears until he heard nothing but a dull roar. Why it did, Max didn’t know. Was it the way she said it, or what she meant? The fact that she believed the facade? The idea of her thinking he was more than he was? More than a sad, broken man, with nothing beyond the four walls he sat himself in? That she was being lied to, even as she spoke?

Max didn’t know, but he feared the truth too much to ask. 

“I can show you this godforsaken fountain, at the very least.” Claire huffed, a clear sign that she was now working while she spoke to him. “The way to a gal’s heart  _ is _ through her pottery, after all.”

She was completely oblivious to what she could do to him - completely obvious to the fact he’d been rendered completely apoplectic, child on his lap notwithstanding. She could be a superhero, the way she could do that without even trying - strike him down with barely a word out of her mouth. Could probably rival the certain one he knew...though he’d take her clay stained hands and sly smile any day. 

“I’d like that.”

It was honest. Perhaps the first honest thing he’d said in ages. The first thing that felt like it was coming from him, from that boy, deep down, who still believed in kindness and dreams and was determined to grab the world by the shoulders. He said it with perhaps too much verve, too much enthusiasm -  _ Christ, Max, you’re going to scare her away _ \- but it was out before he could stop it. She’d peeled away the layers of the years, all the bullshit and fancy exterior and deteriorating charm, until nothing was left but the man inside. 

He hoped he could measure up. 

“Alistair has a soccer game next week,” he said quietly, “But I’m sure we can figure something--”

“Are you free tomorrow night?”

To hell with car salesman. Claire could’ve been a pitcher, for all her talent with chucking him curveballs. 

“Tomorrow?”

“I’m off and I have keys to the studio.” The line rustled, like she too had shrugged aimlessly. “I’m a much better instructor when it’s one-on-one. Unless Alistair wants to come, too.” 

Max sputtered, not expecting her response. Some part of him, some bit of the man that had seen women fly and turn into cheetahs and defy all logic, wondered if she could see him. Could see all that mattered to him, wrapped in pajamas covered in ninja turtles and curled up in his lap, content to sleep even if he’d wake with a crick in his neck.

“Oh, I…”

“I take it he’s with you,” Claire said, the clattering sounds of handbuilding now audible under her voice. “Most men don’t whisper unless they’ve got sleeping babes lying around.” 

Superheroine she was not, to the relief of Max’s paranoia. He sighed. 

“Lying on top of me, actually.” 

He glanced down at Alistair, still fast asleep despite the turmoil currently raging in his father’s head. He ran a hand through his boy’s hair, and Claire hummed. 

“Mmm.” The line rustled again. She’d lowered her voice. “Best leave Smaug to his slumber then.”

Max chuckled. A single, slightly bitter sound. 

“Smaug is wide awake, I assure you.” 

_ And cursed not to rest for a hundred years, to boot. _

“So that makes Alistair your precious gold?” Claire asked. There was a warmth to her voice, the suggestion that she knew more than she let on. That she paid attention with that artist’s eye of hers, despite Max not being much of a show. When he was so used to being invisible. 

He nodded, despite himself. 

“Undoubtedly.”

Max might not have much, but Claire was right. And he’d protect that with his life. 

“Well, if Smaug wants to bring any of his treasure around, I’d be more than happy to see you both.”

Claire said it with ease, and Max stilled. Happy was not a word anyone had used to describe his presence in a long time. 

He fell silent for a moment, considering Claire’s offer. Tomorrow was Friday, and it wasn’t like he had much to do with his life. Wasn’t like his life was much at all. It barely existed, beyond the walls of his home. He was barely more than a name and a nice face, hollowed out and forced to start over. Retry before he’d even figured himself out in the first place. 

His life was shallow, not much beyond he and Alistair and the desire to make his son proud. And if he was being honest with himself? Claire was, for all intents and purposes, the second best thing in it. 

But he feared saying that might scare her. 

“The treasure is going to his mother tomorrow.” He said it shakily, despite the fact that it was the truth. He didn’t want to let her down.“But I…”

He trailed off, the words he wanted to say stuck in his throat. Blocked up by a dam constructed from years of experience. 

_ I’d still like to see you. I’d like to spend time with you.  _

Too fast, Max. Too much. Look what happened the last time. 

So, he settled for silence, as uncomfortable as it made him. As uncomfortable as it felt to leave himself up to the mercy of the universe, a mercy that he couldn’t control with one slick word and a guarantee this wouldn’t all end with him flat on his face. A mercy controlled entirely by a tall woman with clay stained on her soul. 

“Trust me, Max.” She spoke as if he hadn’t trailed off, as if he’d given her a perfect in rather than a gaping, awkward void. “You’re not as bad as you think you are. You just need to focus.”

Max scoffed.  _ Focus  _ was what had landed him where he was in the first place. 

“You underestimate how clumsy I can be,” he said. But Claire was right on his heels. 

“And you underestimate my tenacity.” 

She sounded final, like she’d be taking no arguments. That she wouldn’t believe the truth sitting right in front of her: the evidence of a man that had failed, that had lost control so catastrophically that it almost cost him his own life. She saw nothing more than a man lacking confidence and a decent taste in fashion, who she’d given her phone number because something in him seemed interesting. 

“Is it a date, then?”

She’d left him no choice. Led him into the forest with no way out but through. Held his hand until he couldn’t feel the ground underneath his feet, until he was floating miles out from shore. Until he was left with only one thing to do. 

Part of him very much hoped it was intentional. 

“I suppose it is.” 

She was so good at stealing his voice from him. Taking the air from his lungs, a witch’s spell that left him numb and warm inside. But this - this tiny, brief set of words - came out perfectly. Came out not as a croak, but as the man a very small part of him knew he could be. Confident. Self-assured. Knowing exactly what he was doing. 

And fearing the way he knew it had every possibility to go. 

His brain came back to Earth, back to the sleeping boy on his lap and the phone against his ear and the very real feeling of his heart thumping heavily against his chest. It settled back into his skull, keenly aware of what he’d just done, and vividly aware of Claire...laughing?

It was a soft giggle, barely audible over the shuffle of his hair against hard plastic and the terrible reception of a backwoods phone service. But it was a giggle nonetheless, hollow as she pulled the phone away from her - perhaps a private moment he hadn’t been meant to hear. 

“Great.”

The word had never sounded so wonderful.

“Oh, and Max?”

The sound of something clattering to the floor in her excitement rang in Max’s ear, and his breath caught in his throat.

“Yes?”

He couldn’t imagine what else she wanted to say. What else she could convince him to do, just because he wanted so badly to please her. He couldn’t imagine what else she could do to draw out the conversation, pull more words from him despite the fact that his brain was mildly short-circuiting. 

What he could imagine, though, was her face. That smirk he knew she was wearing, the one that made her cheeks go round and eyes shine bright. The same one that had crossed it nearly a week ago in the library, when she’d scribbled on a piece of paper and invited him back into her life. 

“Try to wear something a little more comfortable this time.”


	4. drilling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A pottery is not a typical place for a date. But Claire isn't a typical girl.

“You teachin’ a class tonight, Claire?” 

The voice was loud in Claire’s ear, an echo on cheap linoleum tile as she glanced up from the purple nail polish she was picking to shreds. (It was a bad habit, and she knew it, but idle hands and devil’s playthings and whatnot.)

The community center lobby had been quiet up to that point, classrooms closed for the day and straggling children picked up by their parents. It was a Friday night in a suburb of the city, and the center had turned in, ready to hand the baton over to the movie theaters and record shops and lover’s lanes until Monday morning. Even the hum of the air conditioner seemed dampened by the dimming of the lights, hopping from spotlight to spotlight, not daring to venture out in the cold dark of the rest of the building. 

The cold dark where Claire stood, staring at the building director, currently emerging from an office she had assumed was empty. 

“Hey, Stella.”

She waved, in the quiet, embarrassed way of a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. She had every right to be here, but seeing her boss had thrown her off. Put a notch in the blind confidence she’d had driving over, blasting Patty Smyth and rolling over how she was going to teach a grown man to throw pottery on a wheel. Stella wasn’t a judgemental woman - hell, she let Claire use the studio whenever she wanted, but still. No woman in her thirties wants to admit she’s hanging around to see a boy. 

“I thought Annie closed up on Fridays.”

Stella looked her up and down, equally as surprised to see someone in the building this late. She was a short woman, tiny where Claire was large, and the looks behind her large glasses was one Claire knew well: nosey, but not quite enough to ask. 

“She does,” she said, by way of explanation, “And I’m not. I’m just meeting a…”

_ Friend _ ? Is that what this was? Is that who Max Lord was to her?  _ Acquaintance _ sounded too formal a word for whatever they were, and  _ boy _ made her sound like she was twelve. She didn’t want to call it a date - even though she had, in so many words, called it that to Max’s face. They’d met each other all of twice, and she’d practically shoved the idea of his returning here down his throat. And on the promise of showing him her monster of a commission, to boot. 

“A patron,” she decided. “From the library.”

There. That made her sound successfully  _ not _ like a character in a lesser John Hughes movie.

“At the studio?”

Stella quirked an eyebrow, forming that crease in her brow that Claire knew meant she was already suspicious. Young woman like her, hanging around a community center this late on a Friday evening? She should be out, living her life in the heart of the city. Having fun, embracing the excess of the 80s. Not standing around in some dim lobby that she spent half her weekdays in anyway. 

Or at least, that’s what most people in Claire’s life thought. 

She shrugged, determinedly appearing noncommittal. 

“He wants to learn.” 

The eyebrow didn’t move. Not a good sign. 

“He?”

D efinitely suspicious now, Claire thought. That was what she got for waiting to unlock the studio.

“I have friends that aren’t my coworkers, Stel.”

There it was anyway, despite herself -  _ friends _ . She supposed that was what she and Max were. (She certainly liked him enough to accept it, anyway.) She wasn’t sure if two meetings and an overly tardy phone call counted as a friendship, but if the word wanted to worm its way out of her mouth? Fine. She was friends with Max Lord. She was friends with the awkward man who’d stumbled into her pottery studio, the one she’d teased and encouraged and given her number to entirely because she thought his smile was nice. She was friends with Max Lord, the man she’d listened to wax poetic about golden opportunities every day for three weeks as she wondered how to catalogue the new Bruce Springsteen record. He’d stumbled into her life and stayed, and that’s what he was. 

Friend seemed like a good enough word to cover up what she could feel burrowing deep in her chest. 

“We’ll be two hours, tops.” The words kept coming, spinning away the seconds until Max arrived. “And I won’t turn on the kiln.” 

She highly doubted they’d even get that far, and Stella seemed to know it. Either that, or she was attempting to keep Claire’s embarrassment to a minimum. No sense in losing her best teacher over a boy. 

“Just make sure you clean up when you’re done,” she replied softly. Claire nodded. 

“Of course.” 

_ If they’d even get that far.  _

Stella tipped her head in return, locking her office behind her and triple checking her pockets and purse - and there were a lot to check, given her habit of imitating Janis Joplin. 

“You have a good night, dear.” Everything seemed to be in order, Woodstock tickets and all. “Have fun.”

“You too!”

Claire smiled as she started off, into the evening and off to whatever community engagement directors do on their weekends off. (Certainly not hanging around the building waiting for besuited television personalities to appear.) Her kitten heels clacked on the floor, and Claire watched as Stella turned her head back, Joni-Mitchell length hair swinging over her shoulder as she made one last bit of eye contact.

“And no canoodling in my studio!” 

S he’d disappeared out the door before Claire could fire back, halfway down the back stairs by the time  _ “I don’t canoodle! _ ” made its way out of her employee’s mouth. It was a sharp echo on the cheap stucco walls, a bounce like a child’s ball on concrete. More a reassurance to herself than the last word in an argument. 

Not that Claire would ever admit that, of course. 

The return to silence suddenly seemed deafening, cotton stuffed in Claire’s ears as she checked her watch for the thousandth time. Normally, she was a master of silence, a ninja in Irish wool and LA Gear five days a week. Silence was her forte, where she felt most comfortable. Where she didn’t have to worry about what came out of her mouth and how she acted and what exactly she was going to do when a certain silver-tongued businessman walked through the heavy double doors. 

Had she come too early? What time had she told Max to be here? Should she just unlock the studio now? Why was she being so touchy about this? 

_ Guess things change when you don’t have a job to protect your dignity.  _

The silence felt like a hug - the kind you experience as a kid at parties, the kind from aunts and uncles you don’t really know and would rather stick cocktail spears in your eyes than interact with. One of those weirdly suffocating hugs, that won’t kill you but will definitely make you feel uncomfortable for an extended period of time. Claire was rarely (if ever) uncomfortable. This felt oddly new. A fitting situation, for as odd as Maxwell Lord was. 

Speaking of the devil…

She heard a scuffle on the other side of the hall, the side with the double doors that let out onto the street. It was rubber on tile, the distinctive sound of someone struggling with the obscenely heavy foyer doors but managing to win the battle. Her nail polish escaped another scathing demolition as she glanced up, the setting sun shining a backlight behind the man she’d been waiting for. 

Max Lord, dressed down and claiming victory over the maroon steel doors. 

He’d swapped the suit pants for khakis, cuffed at the ankles with a crease that could’ve cut glass. She could see his arms - scandal of scandals - in what she knew was an expensive button down, the kind guys always bought a size too big just to look cool. Car keys jingled loudly against the silence of the center, and the shellac of his hair shone even in the dim evening light. 

Even dressed down, he looked like he was going on some kind of yacht holiday. 

He looked practically model worthy, compared to her. She definitely hadn’t changed in her car after work, no ma’am - and definitely not into scrap clothes, combat boots and a pair of an ex’s jeans that hung so loose she’d had to punch a new hole in the belt. Absolutely not. She’d considered all of this, intentionally making herself looking as unattractive as possible. 

Definitely not because she’d forgotten her good throwing clothes at home. 

She wondered what they looked like together, standing in the lobby like this. Mismatched, undoubtedly. Two bizarre castoffs of a Gilligan’s Island sequel. What would Stella have said if she’d seen them together? Seen what this ‘patron’ looked like in the flesh? Would she have raised that eyebrow again? Made sure Max heard her comment about canoodling, even though Claire couldn’t imagine anything more uncomfortable or embarrassing?

She probably would’ve offered Claire a hair tie, at the very least. 

“I assure you,” he said as he approached the studio doors, “I’m perfectly fine spattering these with clay.” 

Claire raised an eyebrow of her own, glancing from his perfectly pressed outfit to her own, jeans covered in glaze and logo practically worn off her tank top. 

“You’d better be,” she said, a slow smile invading her face “If you keep insisting on making me look like some kind of gremlin. Do you even  _ own  _ a t-shirt?”

She took the answer to be a no, by the way Max’s eyes dropped, suddenly invested in the pattern on her shoes. The dim, mercifully, disguised the way his neck flushed. 

“You look nothing short of lovely, Miss Diggs.”

She looked like a Gizmo stand-in and she knew it, but she let it slide. That was a bad habit she was forming, letting him by where she would’ve skewered anyone else. Letting him get away with flattering her. 

“Call me that one more time and I’ll make  _ sure _ you get clay on that shirt.”

But only a little bit. 

S he could see Max smile, despite his sudden interest in her feet. He looked nice from that angle, all nose and strong jaw against a nice backlight. 

“If that’s the point of this whole endeavor,” he said, “Then I might as well.” 

She  _ really _ liked that nose.

“You’re worse than my students,” she replied, fussing with the keys in her pocket now that she had something to do with them. She said it with a smile, her head ducked to mirror his, digging in the Mary Poppins-level depths of her pants until she produced a ring chock-full of jingling keys.

“Is that not what I am?” She could see Max respond in her peripheral vision, watch as his gaze followed her hands to the studio door. “Your student, I mean.”

The key  _ clunked _ into the lock, and Claire threw a look over her shoulder. 

“I think you’re a little more than that, Max.”

_ Classy, Claire Jean. No way to read into that at all.  _

She prayed Max had forgotten his reading glasses at home. 

With a flourish that might have been a bit more than necessary, Claire swung the door to the pottery open - a sensation that never got old, no matter how many times she did. Nothing compared to the smell of her medium hitting her in the face, the inevitable warmth that came from working in a room dependent upon firing things at obscenely high temperatures. 

Except maybe Max’s face as she waved him inside, something between curiosity and the look she imagined most people had just before they went skydiving. 

Annie had definitely closed up, Claire noted as she followed closely at Max’s heels. She’d clearly left in a hurry, based on the way the drying room door was hanging wide open, and the poor suckers who taught on Monday mornings had been left to clean all of the throwing bats. Cleaning wasn’t exactly the young woman’s forte, all of her energy devoted instead to throwing porcelain and making messes with glaze that would put Jackson Pollock to shame. She was an  _ artiste,  _ dedicated wholly to her craft while she had the time to waste away. 

Claire missed that kind of mindset; the messy creativity that came with being young and full of ideas. The hyperfocus on the project at hand, without the worry of jobs or taxes or if anyone would even buy it. If it wasn’t for the art, real artists didn’t care. 

Well, maybe they did. But only for worthy exceptions.

“There’s the monster,” Claire said, deliberately ignoring the fact that the workbenches were currently imitating tornado aftermath. Instead, she pointed across the room, to where a hastily-built wooden support housed her in-progress fountain. “She needs to be fired, but at least she’s standing.” 

Max took a glance at it, nearly colliding his shin with a stray footstool in the process. It was huge, and it needed a little bit more turning, but she was proud of it. Handbuilding wasn’t her strength, but dammit if she hadn’t spent eight hours with an Audubon book and a prayer making it work.

“It looks lovely.” 

His smile was lopsided, she noticed. Just the slightest bit, with a dimple on one side that you didn’t see in the commercials. It suited him. 

“Certainly captures the terror of the swans by the Mall.”

He pulled a face, gesturing at the way she’d carved the swans so that they reared up, all grace and power (and room for a water spout). Claire laughed. 

“Not sure that’s what Lindsey wanted, but thank you.” She watched the way he looked at the sculpture, intently rather with the polite glance most did. “That’s what she gets for asking for a four-foot tall garden sculpture.”

In reality, she’d asked for two and a half, but no one looks at pictures of a trumpeter swan and decides that’s enough. Claire hoped her brother didn’t grow any low-hanging fruit. 

She flipped the lights on as she spoke, the pale light bleeding into every crevice of every mess that had been left in their path. They hummed with quiet energy, washing her out and making Max’s hair even more blindingly bottle blonde than it seemed in the daylight. Not your usual choice for a get together, a place like this - anyone else would’ve settled for a coffee shop and the cheap rom-com atmosphere that came with it. 

Not Claire though. She liked to make things difficult. It was in her genes. 

Annie had, at least, done what she’d asked and left a wheel out despite the mess - complete with a bowl of water and all the necessary tools, tucked in a corner of the studio near the windows. Claire suspected she just hadn’t put away the supplies she’d been using, but hey. Run with what you’ve got. 

“Here.” 

She dug into a bag also left by the wheel, filled to bursting with earthenware clay. From it she produced a small mound, a handful of pounds too light to boast much difficulty. She passed it to Max, who embraced it as though she’d handed him a newborn child - his arms locking, his touch as feather-light as could be. 

“‘To practice art is a way to make your soul grow.’”

She nodded to the bundle in his arms, pretending she wasn’t the pretentious asshole who’d just quoted Vonnegut at him. The words sailed directly over his head, a seagull taking flight over the roaring ocean that was the silence between them. She’d figured as much, given the blank expression on his face. He seemed unsure, the same startled alleycat expression he’d worn that day in the library. Part of her wondered if that was his default expression. 

“Now smack it down onto the bat,” she said, slightly desperate to fill the silence. “Hard as  you can.”

Max stilled, looking from her to the clay and back again. He seemed confused. 

“Smack it?” He sounded hesitant, like he lacked the strength to do so in those big hands of his. Claire nodded, mimicking the way he should swing his arm. 

“Like it stole your girl.”

Her hands moved up over her head, palms curled like she was casting a spell, and  _ bam! _ Palms flattened like Sunday fronds, spread in front of her like a rather unimpressive stage performer. She repeated the motion twice, Max’s eyes following her like she was a foul ball sailing through the air - in another life she could’ve lived across the hall, trading pottery for an aerobics class. 

_ Leave that to Becky, _ she thought.  _ I’m not built for those leotards.  _

Max looked no less certain than he had before, but his hands curled just the slightest bit more around his lump of clay. It was no longer a newborn, a thing to be coddled for its support. No, pottery didn’t have time for that kind of fragility. Didn’t cooperate with people who didn’t want dirt under their fingernails, didn’t want to sweat and swear and scream for the art because that was what called to them. 

Claire was glad Max was on the right track.

_ Smack! _

As close as Claire hoped she’d ever get to the sound of a gunshot, the noise ricocheted off the pottery walls, louder than she’d expected. The clay flattened like a pancake, now stuck firmly to a bat Claire realized she probably should have cleaned beforehand. Max did have some strength in those hands after all. 

“Good job.” Claire nodded, her ears ringing just a bit in the hollow of an empty classroom. “Now we have to center it, but I don’t suppose you want to go home looking like you’ve been mud wrestling tonight.”

She waved a hand at the Hamptons Chic look he was sporting, imagining the sight of him covered in clay, inevitable wet handprints on his pants from where every potter stopped to gaze at their work - only to make their dry cleaner regret it later. It was a difficult thing to imagine, what with the way all his clothes seemed creased within an inch of their life - and really there was little chance of him getting dirty on the first try. But her words sounded like a better excuse than, “I don’t want you to be discouraged before you’ve even started”. 

She might teach in her spare time, but that didn’t mean she had to  _ sound _ like a teacher. 

She swung into the low throwing stool before he could resist, pulling the table close to her and dunking her hands into the water. Her elbows drew into her sides, and her hands met their medium, a feeling as familiar under her hands as the skin of a lover. As exciting and uncertain as the first time she’d ever touched a wheel, and as comforting a sensation as ever. 

It wasn’t an easy job, keeping your composure while fighting a lump of clay determined to do as it pleased. Pottery was a fickle hobby - an art form that didn’t give a shit what its artist wanted, too concerned with physics and temperature and other kinds of nonsense that artists didn’t give their own shits about. It was hard work and determination, building from the ground. Forcing your way through even if it means defying the laws of nature itself. 

She was almost certain she pulled a face as monstrous as could be, getting even that small lump of clay where it belonged on the bat. It wasn’t much - enough to pull a bowl or a few cups off the hump - but it was enough to start with. The first brick in what she hoped would be a much larger building. Center that, and she might live to see a lot more of Max in the studio. 

She pulled back from the wheel when she finished, already sweating and undoubtedly already unkempt. She could feel a piece of her hair falling into her face, but she let it be - a shield between her and Max’s inquisitive eyes, as wide as the saucer plates she’d thrown for Sylvie for her birthday. 

“Voila,” she said, gesturing grandly at the lump. “Your gateway drug to pottery.” 

She didn’t know if she was lying or not. Max could just as easily call her cry and never indulge in this again. Decide that the strange woman with the freckles and the overexcited attitude wasn’t worth his limited energy. Leave, never to call her back, abandon her to wondering what kind of artist he could have been. 

She gestured to the seat she’d vacated, and Max took her place with shockingly little argument. She watched over his shoulder as she claimed another stool, noticing him look down at the wheel with a grim expression. Not exactly the most hopeful of students, she thought briefly.

“Now what?”

He looked back at her, pupils still big enough to serve tea on. It was an unsteady gaze, the flickering of a VHS tape rewound one too many times. The same gaze Claire had seen in the library, the instant she’d ratted on him for looking for her. So nervous, for such an important man.

“Go to town.” 

She shrugged, not really sure what else to say. 

“I want to see what you’re comfortable with. What you’re willing to learn. Make anything you can think of. Doesn’t have to be perfect. Doesn’t even have to stay standing.”

Not the greatest of directions for a new student, but Max Lord wasn’t your typical student. Wasn’t your typical meet cute, either. 

Claire sensed that Max needed the freedom. Needed someone to let him make the first step, guide the dance rather than standing on their feet. He needed the room for that confidence, to let his hands do the work as his brain switched everything else off. She sensed he wasn’t a man familiar with what he could do, what he could accomplish with just those hands and whatever came out of his mind. 

Either that, or something had happened that he needed to re-learn. 

She watched as he leaned into the table, mimicking what she’d been doing moments before. He eased his foot against the pedal below him, and it began to spin - slowly, she noted, the turn of a ballerina in a music box. Gentle. Delicate. Hesitant, Claire thought. And a little bit fearful. 

“It won’t bite you, Max.” 

She leaned in a bit closer, her voice soft in his ear and over his shoulder. He was as nervous as he’d been that first day, that parent content to sit back and watch rather than partake. His gaze locked on the sight in front of him, as if all the possibilities that lay within the small lump of clay overwhelmed him into stillness. Like he was the statue instead of Claire’s fountain, an accidental run-in with a woman who kept snakes under her headscarf. 

But this wasn’t a man in awe of his son. This was something else, buried deeper. The secret that lives in the space between every person’s ribs. The thing they keep tucked close to their heart for fear of being found out.

“I know.” Max’s voice was hushed. Breathless. “But I happen to have a rather clumsy habit of ruining good things.”

The wheel came to a stop, and Claire sighed. 

“I guess it’s good that clay can be a bastard then.”

She wondered, for a brief moment, why he’d said yes to coming here. Why he’d agreed to come if he was so uneasy. If, in her excitement, she’d coerced him into something he didn’t want to do. If she was slowly scaring him off with every word out of her mouth. 

“Besides,” she said, despite herself, “I thought you were the man with the Midas touch.” 

Max’s face stilled. 

“Hardly.” 

She’d struck a nerve. She could see it in the muscle of his jaw, the way it tensed the second she’d opened her mouth. The word came out clipped, a surprise for him. Claire frowned. 

“And why’s that?” 

“Simple, really.” He ran a hand through his hair, cracking the thick shellac with unsteady fingers as he stared down at the bat. “Bad decisions lead to worse decisions, and worse decisions lead you into the fire. It’s not something I particularly enjoy talking about.”

He grimaced, and Claire watched the way it dragged his features together, distorted them into some upsetting parody of a Picasso. A version of Max far from the one she’d met, the version that lived beyond the awkward laughter and the flushed cheeks and the man who loved his son. This was a Max she wasn’t sure she was meant to be seeing - the lab hidden behind the trapdoor in the fireplace she hadn’t meant to trigger. A Max reserved for the privacy of his own mind. 

_ But a decision is what led you to me,  _ she thought, with some feeble sense of hope in her veins. _ Right? _

“Tell me about Alistair then.” 

She didn’t think before she said it, didn’t wait for Max’s grimace to fade before launching herself in headfirst. She’d fucked up the song, it was her job to get it back on track - even if Max didn’t know the melody. 

He glanced up at her, eyes wider and darker than they had been before. His cheeks were flushed - _definitely because the drying room’s open,_ _definitely_ \- and pieces of his hair had fallen out of place. She was no longer looking at the face from television, she could tell. She wasn’t hearing the voice telling her life could be better, seeing the sheen of some dollar store Gary Kemp’s lip gloss as he told her how great she was. 

No, this was a different Max Lord. The one that had called her at eleven o’clock last night, flustered and nervous with a sleeping boy on his chest. 

For all she could tell, this was the real one. 

“Claire, I don’t see how I’m supposed to focus  _ and  _ talk to you at the same time.” 

His hands rubbed frustratedly against his legs, nails drawing lines in the fabric of his pants. Staying perfectly in his personal space, like his teacher had suddenly electrified the wheel. Claire wanted to grab those hands and hold them, assure whatever was living inside his brain that he couldn’t ruin this if he tried. 

“Trust me.” She raised both eyebrows, an option less invasive but still as gentle. “It’ll help you relax.” 

She glanced to the bat and back again, and Max’s shoulders slumped, losing that perfect posture he worked so hard to maintain. He looked more normal that way, despite the rising chokehold his fear had over him. Less like ‘those cardboard cutouts they keep in the video stores’, as Sylvie had described him. (Though Sylvie would see her married to Mr. Gumby, if it meant a ring on her finger. Perhaps Claire’s perspective was skewed.) He was more man than facade now, hands gripping the edge of the wheel and eyes staring at Claire like she’d just grown a third head. 

“He likes Iron Man, right?”

Claire was scraping the bottom of the barrel now, but that’s who she was. Willing to crack her own head if it meant producing a smile. 

“Who else does he like?” She grabbed a piece of clay of her own, a tiny thing she wedged against her leg as she spoke. “What toys does he play with? What movies should I put on hold for him at the library? What do you like to do together?”

The clay squashed against her leg, leaving red streaks over the denim she’d stolen ages ago. Her fingers dug into the clay, cementing it under her nails, but Claire hardly noticed. Her gaze was too fixed on Max, whose eyes had fallen back to the wheel.

“I…”

She could see the wheels turning in his head, rusty and in need of oil. Out of practice of talking about things that weren’t his job, Claire guessed. His mouth opened and closed, starting and stopping sentences Claire would never get to hear. Had she scared him, asking about his son like that? She barely knew him, but it was obvious that boy was his world. And parents loved talking about their kids, if her mother was any indication. Had she made a mistake, overstepping like that? 

Or had no one else ever asked him his son? Had no one else ever cared? 

“He loves those Transformer things.” 

The words came without preamble, slightly stilted as Max divided his attention between her and the pedal. The wheel began to spin, filling the room with a familiar electric  _ whir _ , and Claire smiled. 

“The toy cars that turn into robots?”

He glanced sideways at her, hoping she understood. Claire made a noise of approval, careful not to disturb his decision to brave the wheel.

“I’m familiar.” 

Max nodded, just barely, eyes fixed heavily on the slowly rotating ball of clay. An ever-rotating clock, counting down the seconds until he could bring himself to move. 

“They’re all over the house,” he said, a note of measured fondness in his voice. “Same with the action figures. He likes making stories out of them. Building cities out of moving boxes.” 

“A boy after my own heart,” Claire replied. “Does he like  _ Star Wars _ ? Boys seem to like that.”

Not that she knew much about it, but still. It was a librarian’s job to stay informed. 

Max hummed, fidgeting in his seat. 

“Only the one with the helmet,” he murmured. “Biba something...?”

Claire snorted. 

“Boba Fett?”

“That one.” 

He fidgeted more. The wheel sped up. 

“Says he reminds him of me,” he said, “For whatever God-forsaken reason. Probably because his mother banned lightsabers in the house after a rather unfortunate accident with one of her vases.” 

Claire shrugged. 

“That seems to be the trend,” she replied. “We had to ban them from the library too.”

She got a smile out of him for that, and she didn’t blame him. The visual of small children running around a “no yelling” zone wielding light-up plastic tubes  _ was _ pretty funny, as much as it gave Sylvie migraines. 

“He makes do with the action figures.” The wheel sped up now, Max’s hands finally releasing their death grip on the table to tentatively touch the clay. “And I don’t think I’ve slept in on a Saturday morning since he was born.” 

He was going without Claire’s encouragement now, the words coming as freely as they seemed to on TV. They were gentler words, kinder words, but the confidence was still there. The pride in his little boy still obvious. Claire’s strategy had worked. The song was back in tune. 

“I could probably sing the Masters of the Universe theme in my sleep. And whatever the hell that Ghostbusters song is. He’s convinced he wants to be one of them for Halloween.”

He calmed as he spoke, his hands shaking less and less the more that spilled out of his mouth. That boy was as dear to him as his own life, Claire could tell. Maybe dearer, the way his eyes shone in a way she knew wasn’t because of the fluorescents. She supposed that’s what it was like, having children. Being willing to cut your own soul in half in order to give them theirs. Doing whatever’s necessary to put the world in their hands. Claire didn’t have children, but she understood the sentiment. 

“What about you?”

The words came as a surprise, popping out between Max’s attempts to wet down his hands. They were lighter, a piggyback off his monologue about Alistair, and Claire’s brow furrowed. This was supposed to be about him. 

“What  _ about  _ me?” 

She watched as he fiddled with the spinning clay, deliberately avoiding eye contact in the process. She hated when other people watched her throw, so she might as well extend the same courtesy to him. (And not at all because he’d snapped the conversation back in her face like a brand new rubber band.)

But Max clearly thought the opposite, peeking at her between bids to keep his elbows close to his chest. 

“What do you like?” he asked, voice wobbling as he found his grip on the clay. “What do you do for fun?”

_ You’re looking at it, Big Shot.  _

“Not much, really.” Claire knew it was a cop out answer, but she went with it anyway. “I told you. I’m a single, thirty-five year old woman who works in a library and plays with clay on the side. I don’t have much in the way of a social life.” 

“Neither do I.” 

Max looked up from the bat, the wheel slowing just enough for him to give her his full attention. 

“You said you wanted to keep me interested,” he said. Claire frowned. 

_ Oh, how dare you. _

“I guess...” 

She trailed off, trying to think of what she could tell Max. Did she dare tell him she spent her Saturdays in a coffee shop, hanging around with the old women from work and gossiping over hot tea? Did she tell him how much she rollerskated, about all the times she’d eaten shit trying to skate down the Smithsonian plaza, or the fact she’d spent her last bonus on ridiculous hot pink wheels? Did she dare let him that far into her life, this man who’d waltzed in with his nice profile and pleasing laugh and fascinated her though she barely knew him? 

Or should she stick to the basics, just in case?

“I’ve exhausted our entire sci-fi section at the library.” 

That seemed like a good enough place to start, if any. It earned her a raised eyebrow, if anything. 

“I listen to a lot of George Michael. I unironically watch  _ Dynasty.  _ I saw  _ Purple Rain _ four times in the theater. I have a stupid poster of Rod Stewart on my closet door that my best friend bought me in college.”

Okay, so the poster might have been a step too far. But at least Max looked sufficiently interested. 

“And you really went to school to be a librarian?”

Max was thoroughly focused on the wheel, hands making what looked vaguely like a bowl, but his voice quirked upwards anyway. Claire wasn’t sure what was so interesting about her masters, but she went with it. Most men ran the other way when they discovered where she worked. 

“Not initially.” She shrugged, watching his hands fidget with the clay. “Originally I was in for forensic pathology.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I was a weird kid.” 

Understatement of the decade, Claire. 

“Then I discovered I was shit at math, so library science it is.” 

“Where?” Max was futzing with his clay now, forcing a hole into it for it to spread. “Georgetown?” 

Claire shook her head. 

“V-Tech.” 

Not her first choice, admittedly, but it worked. Got her here, through some bizarre twist of fate. Max seemed to approve. 

“Where you met the best friend with the thing for Rod Stewart.” 

He flashed her a look as he thinned the sides of what Claire assumed was supposed to be a bowl. She laughed. 

“Yeah.” Max’s bowl slowly began to take shape, and she smiled. “Her name’s Sadie. She owns a record store down in DC now. Sold a Bob Dylan single to Andy Taylor once.” 

She paused, watching her student move with the absolute worst technique, but the best intentions. His hands fumbled, too large for the clay she’d given him, but he hadn’t given up yet. Hadn’t stopped and decided he’d ruined it, as so many new students did. He was trying, for all that he’d said he was useless. 

“She made me promise I’d call,” she continued, “In case you started showing serial killer-y tendencies.” 

She’d spoken too soon. The rise of Max’s bowl slowed, its undeniably bowed sides left rippled like an ocean wave. The sign of someone who was starting to taste defeat, as false as that feeling could be.

“You keep bringing that up.” He sounded less sure than before. Quieter. Choosing not to look back at her. “I’m starting to think I scare you.” 

_ Shit.  _

For a librarian, she had a shockingly loud mouth. Sadie was... _ abrasive _ at best - she knew that - and even censoring her down from “if Trust Fund Ted Bundy doesn’t kill you, I will” had clearly been a mistake. The  _ last  _ thing Max did was scare her - if anything, she was the one that kept scaring him. 

She wanted to tell him that the only thing that could scare her was being knocked off a library ladder, or going blind, or something that had nothing to do with him. She was scared of drowning, and riding city buses at night, and accidentally going fast enough on her skates that she face-planted and busted her nose. She was afraid of snakes and spiders and the depth of the ocean. If anything, Max was one of the least terrifying things that had come into her life. 

She’d known unsettling men before, and despite questionable fashion sense, Max couldn’t touch the bar if he jumped. 

Not that she could tell him that. Not if she didn’t want to scare him in turn. 

And she knew he spooked easily. 

“I think it’s the hair.” She tried to quirk a smile, tried to lift the weight that she’d clearly placed on his shoulders. Stand-up comic she was not, but alas. “It throws people off.” 

She raked a hand through her own curls, relishing the tug of her ring as it caught in her hair. It was a minor inconvenience, a bit of self-inflicted penance as she watched Max still. 

“Looks fine though,” she mumbled, suddenly uncomfortable in the silence. ‘Specially like this.”

A complete bastard of a lie, on her part. But there was a kernel of truth in it; it looked better this way, messy and hanging in his face as he focused. The Aqua Net shell cracked just the tiniest bit, exposing the Max Lord she knew lived under all of the effort he made to impress people. The Max Lord that had piqued her interest, sitting in this same room, watching his boy work. 

“Yacht rock looks good on you.” 

She nudged his shoulder with her hand, brushing off an imaginary piece of dust with a smile. That part wasn’t a lie, as much as Sadie would give her shit for it later. This Max, this version that had found a groove of his own, independent from the world and aura of Black Gold, looked good. That independance, that singularity of mind, worked on him. Lifted something off his shoulders that she couldn’t quite see, but knew she held something similar on her own. Something she could shrug off when she sat at the wheel and focused all of her energy into nothing but creating. 

And yeah. The button down made his arms look great. 

Something in Max’s face softened, something she couldn’t identify as the wheel came to a slow stop in front of him. What sat on it was...admittedly misshapen, something closer to a Dadaist art piece than a functioning piece of pottery. The walls wobbled, one side certainly taller (and thinner) than the other, and Claire could see visible fingerprints all over it. She gave it a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the kiln at best - and that was if she trimmed the shit out of it first. 

But Max had made something. And that was prettier to her than even the best porcelain. 

“And look at that.” 

Claire beamed at him, pointing at the pot excitedly, like someone had just handed her to keys to a Ferrari. 

“You made something!” 

She really was proud. He’d finished the dance, reached the end of the song without stepping on anyone’s toes. Without her giving him any clues. Even if he never did anything again, it was something. One more thing than he’d made before. 

Max frowned. Obviously, he didn’t feel the same. 

“It’s hardly an accomplishment.”

He was gazing at his work with a grimace, a look like he’d destroyed something rather than created it. His voice had gone quiet again, barely louder than the drying room fan on the other side of the studio. He looked small, and it wasn’t because he’d foregone the shoulder pads today. 

Accomplishment it might not be, but it was something. And something, Claire figured, was enough to be proud of.

“It’s got some sides and it doesn’t have a hole in the bottom.” She looked at him, locking eye contact before he could turn away. “Even I can’t manage that sometimes.”

“But it looks rather…off.” 

He waved vaguely at it with one hand, a perfect image of a yuppie car salesman appraising a beat-up sedan. His grimace deepened, nose scrunching and brow furrowing like a staunch imitation of a cartoon character. Claire refused to let him break eye contact. 

“I like them a little wonky.” She smiled. “Gives them character.”

_ Just like people.  _

“And will it retain its...character forever?”

Max still looked uncertain, hair obscuring the rather unpleasant face he was giving her in an attempt to prove that yes, he  _ had _ ruined this, just like whatever it was he’d alluded to earlier. Claire could see something in his eyes, something she wanted to grab hold of and shake until it fell loose - childishly, like a toddler in front of a claw machine, desperate to win something at the arcade. 

“Mmm,” she mused, “I guess you won’t know until we fire it.”

“And how long does that take?” Max asked. She shrugged.

“Couple of days.” She reached for a wire from another table, pulling it taut to detach Max’s piece from the bat. “She’s gotta dry, then we’ve got to fire her, then she has to cool for a few days. She can be kiln pals with the demon swans.” 

She made a gesture with her shoulder, towards her own work as she stood - only to move, squatting next to Max by the wheel. In her boots, she nearly came eye to eye with him, half her energy focused on his profile even though she was notoriously bad at wiring off. 

“I take it that gives me another excuse to see you?”

She was nearly shoulder to shoulder with Max, their eyes focused on the same, fragile thing. His words took her by surprise, a sucker punch that could’ve earned her heart a gold medal in gymnastics. The wire cut into her hands, a sharp physical reminder of what she was doing, of his presence directly next to her, her focus shot to bits.

Excuses, excuses. That was how she kept Max in her life. Kept him from drifting away in a sea full of shoulder pads and fake tans, all indistinguishable from each other and as tacky as a two-tone Cadillac. Excuses to call, to say hi, to steal glances at him when he wasn’t looking even though she wanted him to know she was. Excuses to be in the same room, despite the fact that the universe had put them on wildly different paths. 

Reasons to keep Max coming back, despite the myriad of reasons he might have seen not to. 

“If you want your bowl back, sure.”

With that, she wired the bowl off, separating it from the bat before she was lost to the rabbit hole inside her head and turned back to find it singing about unbirthday parties and March hares. Max glanced at her, and at her hands as she gently pulled it away from the wheel. He looked visibly unsure. 

“What if it shatters?” he asked. 

“What if it doesn’t?” 

Claire rocked back on her heels, a gentle smile resting on her face. She pulled herself up with a lower body strength known only to studio artists, Max’s bowl gently cradled between her hands like a child.

“What if it survives?” Her voice was gentle, encouraging. Opening the gate to that freedom Max so rightly deserved. “What if you’ve got that Midas touch after all?”

She watched him, craning her neck as she rested his piece on a nearby table. His face had stilled, halfway between expressions like an Atari waiting to boot up. She couldn’t read him, but she suspected she’d shocked him - possibly with her faith, or possibly with the fact that she’d thrown her own words back in his face. Blind confidence, that was how she operated. Believing the best in people until they proved her otherwise. And she suspected Max might need a bit of that confidence.

“We’ll just have to wait and see, huh?”


	5. opening

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Max needs to get out of his own head.

If there was a better medicine for headaches on the market, Max had yet to find it. 

He could feel his corneas burning the longer he stared at that day’s paper, the longer he sat in an uncomfortable kitchen chair that was bound to do his back in sooner rather than later. It was a steady burn, a fire behind his eyes that he had no means to dissipate. Every glass of water felt like oil - some cruel trick, a fucked up sense of suburban Catholic guilt. 

(God works in mysterious ways, they said. Perhaps ‘mysterious’ didn’t always equate to positive.) 

(He would’ve preferred wine, in any case.)

It was a necessary evil, he told himself. To find a job and provide for himself and his son, if only because sitting alone for days on end made him understand what was so troublesome about yellow wallpaper. How he’d survived this long was a miracle - some cosmic favor, a mystical clerical error he’d ridden like a surfer on a choice wave. Money in his bank account that he hadn’t known of, enough for a down payment and to get the hell out of dodge. 

Money that was slowly, but very, very surely, running out. 

He needed to be here. Needed to pay attention. He couldn’t go on living off emergency funds. Couldn’t go on with this husk of a life, barely convincing the mother of his child he was worth having around. Couldn’t sit in this house, stewing until he started stripping the paper from the walls. 

What else was he supposed to do?

The wanted ads had eyes like daggers, pulling at the lapels of his jacket, taunting him like a school bully for trying so hard. For putting himself out there when all he had to offer was a few nice words and a husk of his former self. (Believe it or not, showing up in expensive Armani does  _ not _ increase your likelihood of successful job prospects.) They pulled back his skin and stared at his clockwork innards, the pieces that had rusted long ago, held together by duct tape and a false sense of charm. Pieces that couldn’t pull off functioning like a normal person if his life depended on it. 

What had happened to him? What had happened to that man, the one he was a lifetime and a near destruction of the world ago? The new father, the ambitious man, ready to take on the universe if it meant success? Where had that drive gone? Seeped out of the cavity in his chest, perhaps? The one that got slightly bigger with every ding to his pride - every divorce, every failed business venture, every excruciatingly painful rejection? Had someone scooped it out of his chest and fed it to the eagles - or had he offered it up himself, in exchange for success?

_ Unqualified.  _

_ Untalented.  _

_ A fraud.  _

_ A conman.  _

He’d tied himself to this rock, and now he must live with it. Live with the eagles scavenging for more, despite there being nothing left. 

He raked a hand through his hair, rings catching on the sticky muck he put there every morning to keep it in place. It stung, radiating down to meet the ache behind his eyes until he felt like Olivia Newton-John had gone feral and wrapped one of her exercise bands around his head. It was a dull ache, a reminder that no matter who he thought he was, there was always something else living just below the surface. That he was always something else behind the pressed suits and the trained smiles. The kraken he’d rather not see breach the waves. 

He thought of the man he saw in the mirror as he extricated his hand - the man people saw when they looked at him. Pristine, but off, he knew. Like some kind of dollar store Ken doll. An antique with chipped paint, all value lost. A warped glass, a torn painting. Never quite all the way there, despite his efforts to fit the pieces back together. Unstable. Rickety. Wobbly. 

_ I like them a little wonky.  _

The words entered his head before he could stop them. Lodged into his frontal lobe like a parasite, the kind that scratched records and stuck them on the turntable anyway, for a struggling audience of one. The kind that tortured you like a parent over your first crush, until your face was so red you were convinced steam would start pouring out your ears at any second. They spun like tops, looping lines around the words on the paper, blurring them until all his mind saw was a face. Framed by curly hair, dark eyes like a whole different type of dagger to his chest. 

Claire had a habit of doing that, popping in when he least needed it. When all of his guards were down and he couldn’t prepare for the way she slithered in between his lungs, pressing a weight on his chest no over-the-counter pill could cure. A weight that he, for whatever godforsaken reason, kept seeking out. 

Certainly it hadn’t felt this way with Alistair’s mother. Time had skewed his perspective, but this was distinctly different. With Maria it had been quick, like he’d fallen down a flight of stairs and there was a bruise in his chest where his heart should be. This was some kind of odd nagging in his chest, a child poking at a dead thing with a stick to see if it would move. A hand around that bruised heart, squeezing it just to prove a point. 

And it wasn’t like he talked to many women. The last one had been dressed like a gladiator, for Christ’s sake. It wasn’t a huge pool to choose from. 

Was he just that bad with people? Is that what this was? Was he just unable to speak to them unless they gained something in return? Unless they made his own body bleed? Unable to function as anything more than a means to an end? 

Or was Claire something different? 

His mind drifted, unmoored from its already tenuous dock, tracing time backwards like the spool on a cassette. Back to the first track, to the feeling of wet clay under his hands and the tension headache he’d gotten from focusing so hard. To the way his muscles had tensed, and the stale air of an empty community center on a Friday night. To the burn of the fluorescent lights, and the fact that he’d sweated straight through his collar, and how he wished he’d had eyes in the back of his head, so he could memorize the way she’d looked at him. Like he wasn’t making an utter fool of himself in front of her - or at least, like she didn’t mind. 

What she saw in him, he’d never know. 

(Unless it was the blind leading the blind. But her gaze was too certain for that.)

He traced the flowers on the tablecloth blankly, barely seeing the faded, ugly peonies as he did. One of many features of the house he’d planned to replace when they’d moved in, it had slipped his mind, lost to the sieve inside his head that lived where his brain ought to be. Most things slipped through nowadays. Jobs, bills, friends (if he even had any) - everything slipped through. Nothing seemed important.

Nothing but his boy, and her. 

And maybe even that attention was misplaced. 

He’d drifted downstream now, out past the do not pass signs and away from the prying hands stranded at the dock. He was in territory he knew he shouldn’t be, where the rapids ran fierce and he was liable to get himself hurt. He seemed to thrive there, in that dangerous in between. It was where he did the best, where his focus was sharp despite a lack of clarity otherwise. A pair of eyeglasses, rose tinted enough that the black water ahead seemed the prettiest blue.

It wasn’t a sustainable way of living. He knew that. His boat never failed to hit the rapids, to flip over and add another scar to his collection. It was foolish at best, and catastrophic at worst. No, it wasn’t sustainable in the least. 

But he’d lived his life in the creek, and he’d never really had a paddle. 

_ Thunk. _

The noise was a moor against the steady drone of Max’s thoughts, and his attention snapped back, away from the heat and the silence and the feeling of someone else’s eyes on him. Back to the chill of the air conditioning, and the pain in his head, and the sudden sight of Alistair as he turned his head, hands so full of toys Max thought he might tip over at any moment. One had fallen to the floor, limbs splayed out in what could only be impossible positions. He would’ve cringed, had his boy not been standing right there. 

“Can I play with you?” 

Alis’ face was stretched into a smile, and for a moment Max was relieved he hadn’t been facing the doorway. The tension in his jaw slackened - a miracle in itself - and he brushed the hair out of his face with the flat of one un-ringed hand. No boy deserved to see his father in such a state. Let the real world come to him later. When he’s older. When things make more sense. That truth had no place in the space between the two of them. 

Max stretched out his arms, partly to embrace his boy and partly to avoid any superhero head trauma, should Alis drop anything on his way in. Really, he should probably be in bed ( _ how late was it? how long had Max been sitting at the table? _ ), but when had that mattered?

(A question his mother might ask later, but that was then. And Max had vowed to live in the now.)

“I would love nothing more.” 

Nothing but truth with his son, he’d promised himself. And truth his words were - any excuse to avoid the piercing eyes of the outside world, to push the hands grabbing for a piece of him off his back, he would take. 

He beckoned Alistair forward, over the threshold and down the odd two stairs the previous owners had deemed necessary for the miniscule dining room. The clatter of plastic pinged off the sad linoleum tile, a cacophony of sound as Max dumped his pile of action figures on the table with all the pomp and ceremony of a car crash. The paper was discarded without a second thought, tucked away under the lazy Susan where it (and all the thoughts it brought along) would hopefully stay, and Max mustered a smile - despite the way that the space behind his eyes burned at the sound of a chair being pulled away from the table. 

Alis was particular about his toys, dividing them up based on some arbitrary childhood criteria as Max watched. He had an array of the figures, Max knew, accrued over various holidays and with paint already chipping off from overuse. They all had names - space invaders and transforming cars and men who could stretch their bodies to limitless lengths. They glittered with the neon so indicative of this new age, this decade of excess, green android and blue faces staring up at him with empty expressions. Stories waiting to be told, wrapped up in cheap, FDA-approved plastic. 

“Remind me who this one is again?” 

He stared down at the table, at the pile Alis had sectioned off for him amongst the peonies. He picked up a rather squat figurine, covered in what Max assumed would be deeply uncomfortable blue spandex, were he real. The toy looked rather angry, but Alistair only smiled, exposing the gap in his bottom teeth where they’d grown in odd. 

“That’s Wolverine.” He gestured with his own figure, one Max could identify as She-Hulk - mostly because she was all green. “He’s the leader of the X-Men, and he has knives in his hands. He’s the coolest.” 

He set She-Hulk down to rest, next to a rather ambitious crossover of Daredevil being held in a chokehold by Optimus Prime. Some vague part of Max wondered whether superstrength could outweigh sheer tonnage, the question spinning in the back of his mind as Alis looked up at him. 

“That’s why I gave him to you.”

What superstrength could  _ not _ outweigh, Max decided, were the bricks that hit the center of his chest when his son said things like that. 

Cool, Maxwell Lord was not. A role model, he most certainly would never be. A leader, hopefully never again. But if his son believed it?

“I’m honored.”

He waved Wolverine vaguely in the air, some odd toast to the fact that there was one person in the world who actually believed in him. One person who actually cared, who saw past the cracked shell and didn’t care, who didn’t see Maxwell Lord the Snake Oil Salesman, but Max Lord the father, the man who wanted to believe he had good intentions, despite it all. One person, he thought, who knew him for him. 

_ Maybe two, Max. Maybe two.  _

“Now, do we have a plan of attack or are we improvising?”

He plastered on a smile for his boy, who grinned right back. Like his father, he was not a boy who came to the table without a game plan. 

“Well, Iron Man says the Fantastic Four can’t be trusted…”

The game was immediate, all thoughts of the wanted ads chucked out the back door like last week’s rubbish. It was a release for Max, to take his mind off of everything but comic characters. He supposed that’s why children did it, made up fantastic tales with their toys that most adults would call rubbish. (He had very little excuse to do it himself, considering what he’d seen.)

The evening air filtered in through the kitchen window as they chattered, the cicadas in the trees the soundtrack to an awful clash of IPs and fictional egoes. Alis was a regular little general, all those hours of reading clearly amounting to something as he narrated their game. Max did nothing more than spin Wolverine and his cohorts in circles, but his boy seemed satisfied, occasionally barking out reminders about Mr. Fantastic’s stretchy arms, or the fact that Storm couldn’t cross the river (the blue cardboard side of an action figure box) because she was electric. It was Max’s own tiny symphony, the sound of his boy’s voice. A radio channel he never wanted to change. 

“Are you ever going to get your bowl from Miss Claire?”

Max almost missed the words over the clatter of plastic, watching as Luke Skywalker collided with a rather brusque Captain America, falling into what Alis had branded as “the lava pits”. (Better known as the space between the edge of the table and the far wall.) His boy clambered under the table, and it took his head popping up from underneath for his words to the words to register in Max’s head.

" My bowl?” 

His brain wandered back again, back to that overheated studio room and the way Claire had looked at him, like she could see everything inside of him and still didn’t care. He wondered how his boy could know about that. Was he talking to himself now? Had he slipped that low?

Alis nodded, tiny torso squashed between the circular table and the wall. Captain America nodded along with him. 

“She said she had a bowl for you.”

He said it matter-of-factly, like it was obvious and duh, Dad, why didn’t you know about it? 

(Max asked himself the same question, several times a day.) 

“And when did she say that?” he asked. Alistair shrugged, disappearing back under the table, action figures in hand. 

“She mentioned it to Mommy when we were there.”

His voice was accompanied by a scuffle, the sound of ancient wood chairs creaking against an awful linoleum floor. Max frowned. 

“At the studio?”

“Yeah.” 

Alis reappeared on the other side of the table, reuniting the figures with their respective assigned teams. He had dust on the end of his nose, a reminder that Max really ought to do some cleaning when he wasn’t moping about. (Another thing he’d forget. That list could’ve made a book.) His words seemed like an afterthought, clearly not as important as impending world domination by a man as solid as rock and a woman who could turn herself invisible. 

“She said I should tell you it didn’t shatter.” 

He twisted Luke’s head back the right way round, and Max’s heart caught in his chest. It snagged on a branch, strung him out to dry by that bruised organ between his lungs. Pulled him apart and stuck him back together, and sent any hope that he might be able to avoid the rapids down the drain. He’d stuck the rose colored glasses on willingly, and the small part of him still battered from the last mistake knew it had nothing to do with ceramics at all. 

_ What if you’ve got that Midas touch after all? _

“Maybe she can give it to you at the library.” 

She-Hulk went crashing into the Fantastic Four, sending them scattering to an early grave under the newspaper. The way Max’s eyes bugged out of his head went unnoticed, Alis too preoccupied with picking out the next weapon in his plastic arsenal.

“Can we go back?” Daredevil quickly replaced She-Hulk, and Alis glanced at his father. “Joey says there’s a new X-Men comic out and I want to see if they have it.”

For once, it wasn’t even a question to Max. For that much, he was thankful. 

“Of course, baby.” He nodded, quick to follow his son’s lead with Wolverine, fiddling as he spoke. “We can go tomorrow, as long as you finish your chores.”

Another crash of plastic, and Alis’s face lit up. Whether it was because he’d said yes or because he’d landed a direct hit with Daredevil, Max wasn’t sure, but he didn’t care. What he’d done to deserve such a beautiful, happy child, he’d never know. 

“And you should say thank you to Miss Claire for that Iron Man book,” he said, taking out The Thing’s legs with one sweep of Wolverine’s. “She picked that out especially for you.”

_ Perhaps with ulterior motives, but still. _

“Okay.” 

Alistair shrugged, the universal sign of children who knew their manners, but couldn’t be bothered to actually care about them. 

“Did you read your book?”

To say Max was embarrassed might have been an understatement. He hadn’t so much as touched the book Claire had given him since her number had fluttered out of it days ago. Hadn’t given it more than a second thought, days’ worth of reading wanted ads sending him reeling away from anything else. To admit you didn’t read in an age so concerned with television didn’t seem like much, but Max was prone to embarrassment. 

Whether it was because of Alistair or Claire, he couldn’t be certain.

“No,” he said, attempting to keep the defeat he felt out of his voice. “I haven’t had the time. But maybe we can pick something else out tomorrow. Together.” 

To cringe in front of your own child seemed the worst of fates, but Alistair - blessed child - seemed unbothered by Max’s admission. He only nodded, enthusiastic at the prospect of getting what he’d asked for.

“Cool!”

It was just one word - a tiny, overused piece of childhood slang, nothing more than naive childhood enthusiasm. He’d heard Alis say it hundreds of times. Anything could be cool, from a TV commercial to the way Max taught him how to skip rocks. It meant as much to a boy his age as trading cards or a new pack of gum. 

But tonight - sitting in a hard-backed chair, the last legs of a headache still clinging to his temples, it hit something deep in Max’s chest. It sewed up the hole there, pulled the branch away and bandaged all of his bruises. It was a balm for all the parts of him that felt unworthy, that felt like, no matter what he did, he’d never be a good father. 

Max had never believed that children saw their parents as perfect. Never had an excuse to himself, and could never see himself as anything even worthy of being proud of. There was always something to nitpick, something he feared Alistair would notice, carrying with him in that secret space in his own heart. Shame. Guilt. Fear. Some reason to doubt Max, to doubt the love that filled his chest so much he thought it might burst in two. Max was not a perfect man, as much as he wanted that to be true. 

But his boy’s smile remained, and never faltered. He played with Max like nothing between them would ever change, and Max didn’t want it to. The importance of his tiny made up world triumphed over bedtime, and nothing else seemed to matter. Not the real world, not the late hour, not the bags under Max’s eyes that should have told Alis more than he needed to know. 

Good triumphed, and the evil was defeated - even if it was only plastic.

And for once, Max enjoyed being on the right side of the field. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello and welcome to filler chapter helllllllll
> 
> More interesting stuff coming soon, I promise! Gotta give Max some time to ~wallow~ for payoff later. Thank you for all the love on this story thus far!


	6. collaring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Claire might just be a bit of an enabler.

Claire could’ve been a ballerina in another life. 

Six year old her had thought about it, sent one too many lamps a-crashing after the first grade field trip to see  _ The Nutcracker. _ It was one dream in a series of many, a handful that had come before someone had smacked some terracotta in her hands and told her to go to town. She certainly had the balance for it now, and the legs to boot. 

Who’d’ve thought it would come from hours on end working in a library. 

It came in handy anyway, all those years of practiced pirouettes and trying her hardest to balance on her toes - particularly when it came to being the only woman on staff with joints still stable enough to climb a ladder. Why Alexandria had such damn high shelves was beyond her, but scaling them became her job anyway, to reshelve the kinds of hardly used paperbacks only checked out by college professors and stoners. She couldn’t count the number of hours she’d spent up there, far above the patron's heads, and how much dust she’d probably inhaled as a result of it. 

Reshelving wasn’t bad, when it came down to it. The only thing more satisfying than the feeling of clay under her hands was the cover of an old book, worn down by love and anger and perhaps more than one incident of a child dropping it in the grass. Those covers held history, the same way clay held possibility - stories beyond just what was written on their pages, of everyone who had ever wanted an escape from the world they lived in. Old women and personal trainers and little children who wanted desperately to believe that Narnia was real. Real estate agents and pastry chefs and the odd thirty-something, who’d dedicated her entire life to preserving the ability to tell stories, to enter a building so dedicated to them that they covered every wall and nook and cranny. 

Stories were special to her, even if the job sometimes wasn’t. That was why she stayed. Even if it meant spending her day ten feet off the ground. 

“No running, please!”

She sounded like a lifeguard from up there. An invisible narrator, or a voice of God, but with decidedly less _ oomph _ in her voice. Mostly, she was trying to avoid making a mid-life break for that prima ballerina career - one wrong step, and she’d be fighting for her life against a rickety pre-war shelving ladder. One of the old-fashioned ones, the kind that attached to the shelves and rolled, despite the clear safety hazard they posed both to Claire and the patrons. (They really ought to replace them, but since when did anyone ever allocate money to public libraries instead of sports teams?) She was breaking her own no-shouting rule, given the height, but with a stack of Descartes and Nietzsche in her hands, there wasn’t much else she could do.

Her voice was directed at a young boy who’d gone zooming down her aisle, sneakers scuffing along the carpet with a speed that could only be possessed by children under twelve. Summer always brought them in, the kids with too much energy, dragged in by their parents in the hope of educating them at least a  _ bit _ between bouts of movie theater trips and Saturday morning cartoons. With it came the running, and Claire put her shelving on pause to see if she could divert some of the boy’s energy into something constructive. 

The boy skidded to a stop at the end of the aisle quickly enough to make Sonic jealous, and Claire was partway down the old ladder by the time he turned around to apologize. 

“Alistair!” 

If it weren’t constantly tensed out of habit, Claire would’ve felt her jaw drop down to her shirt collar. She’d seen the boy only a few short days ago, at the last of her studio classes for the week, but he’d had yet to surface in her workplace. Max hadn’t said anything about coming back, and she’d assumed no kid would willingly come to a library without a reason. It was a welcome break from philosophy books and dust, if anything. 

“Miss Claire! Hi!”

Alistair broke out into a beam, the shoulder of his hoodie slouched from his jogging. He waved to her as she carefully attempted dismounting the ladder, with no spare hands to wave back. She wondered where he’d come from on a random weekday like this. 

“What are you doing here on a lovely afternoon like this?” she asked, glancing between the young boy and the ladder rungs. “It’s so nice out, you should be outside!”

Not exactly what the employee handbook encouraged her to say to eager young children, but it slipped out anyway. Maybe it was her own jealousy, her pining for the ability to go out and bask in the sunshine, despite the fact that she’d burn in an instant if she did. It was the nicest August on record, and nine hour days were no longer as nice to her back as they used to be. Some part of her longed to be a kid again, to sit out in the grass with her boombox and obnoxiously blast Prince without a care in the world. 

Alistair looked like he’d done just that, his cheeks flushed and hair skewed out of place. Claire wondered if he was here with friends, or if his mother would come to collect him, and she’d have to avoid admitting that she’d gone on a date with her ex-husband. 

_ It wasn’t a date, _ she thought to herself.  _ You were being nice. That’s what friends do. Don’t make it weird.  _

“We spent a fair few hours in the park, actually.”

The voice from the end of the aisle answered all the questions Claire might have had, popping in from the void to bust her concentration. Not Alistair’s mother’s, but his father’s, the owner rounding the corner of the shelves as if he’d been waiting for the right moment to reveal himself. 

“Wanted to bring him in before he got sunburnt.”

Something in Claire’s stomach jumped high enough to make Eddie Van Halen jealous. 

_ And I know, baby, just how you feel… _

He was back in another one of his suits, and part of her mourned the loss of the ease she’d seen in him when he didn’t have shoulder pads holding him back. The hair was especially shiny today, matching the slate grey of his jacket perfectly, and he’d cracked the shellac of it just slightly in order to hold a pair of aviators, the size of which she would’ve laughed anyone else out the door for. Not a trace of the shy, unsure man she’d met at her studio was left. 

Except maybe in his smile. The one that was helping her insides train for this year’s Olympics, coupled with the way she could tell the stiffness in his shoulders had nothing to do with the design of his suit. He approached her slowly, and she practically crawled down the rest of the ladder in turn. Two oppositely charged magnets, moving with caution lest they get too close and suddenly fly apart. 

Her coworkers were going to have a  _ fit. _

“Figured we’d come by to return our books.”

He said it matter of factly, but not cruelly -  _ you’re a busy woman, I don’t expect you to remember everything about me.  _ In fact, he looked about as surprised to be there as she was to see him, but maybe that was just the indoor lights making him look spooked. 

She’d completely forgotten about their books, to be honest. Her head was far more occupied with the wonky little pot still sitting on her coffee table, that she’d pulled from a still-hot kiln days ago and hadn’t stopped thinking about since. It sat by the phone, waiting for its owner to call for it, to seemingly no avail. 

She’d stuck it there so  _ she _ wouldn’t sit by the phone, looking like some kind of desperate teenager in a schlocky MTV ad. 

“I like a man who cares about his due dates.” 

She hopped off the last rung of the ladder, holstering the remaining books she’d abandoned shelving against her hip. She tried to mirror the smile on Max’s face, though she suspected the dust motes clinging to her curls dampened its effects quite a bit. She was as askew as Alistair was, appearances all but forgotten when she was busy trying not to tumble ten feet to the floor. 

One day she’d clean up nicely when Max came around. She promised herself that.

“Nice to see you, Max.”

She gave a halfhearted little wave that morphed into brushing stray hairs out of her face. Her elbow remained tucked into her stomach, a habit from years of sitting at the wheel, and she was sure it looked silly as Max came to stand behind Alistair.

“And you.” He tilted his head in her direction, looking her up and down a bit more than she figured was strictly necessary. “We were hoping you’d be around.”

_ Do not read into that, Claire. I’m sure he’s just happy he doesn’t have to deal with Sylvie and Ruth questioning the life out of him.  _

Max set a hand on his boy’s shoulder, breaking eye contact to quirk an eyebrow at him. 

“What do we say to Miss Claire for the book she picked for you?”

“Thank you!”

It was a cute little chirp, perhaps a bit too loud for the library’s usual noise level, but cheerful nonetheless. Alistair looked sincere  —  or as sincere as a ten-year-old could be when put up to something by their parents. He was an animated kid (a surprise, considering his father’s rather significant restraint), and it made Claire smile. She envied the boundless energy that came with being a child.

“You’re welcome.”

She fussed with the books against her hip, grateful she at least had something to do with her hands to quell her surprise. 

“I take it that running around the stacks means you’re going to put that library card to good use and find something else to replace it.” 

Alistair nodded. 

“Do you have any  _ X-Men _ ?”

He seemed practically beside himself with anticipation - clearly he’d been waiting to ask that question since Ma had bundled him in the car and brought him over. Claire had to admit, the kid had taste. 

“A whole  _ shelf _ full.”

Alistair beamed, and the false edges of Claire’s smile fell away until it was real. 

“Do you have the new ones?” he asked.

“Just got ‘em in.” Claire arched a thumb behind her. “Want to see them?”

The boy made a noise that Claire could only interpret as the ten-year-old equivalent of  _ duh, of course! _ , and she laughed. 

“Follow me.” 

She jammed the remaining philosophy books onto a shelf at waist level — a move that would earn her a scolding later, but to hell with it — and nodded her head towards the end of the stacks. Alistair seemed eager to follow, grabbing his (noticeably silent) father by the hand and pulling him into action before she’d even gotten a chance to get moving. Max seemed just as eager, if not a bit shocked at the sudden tug on his suit jacket. 

It was comical, watching Alistair drag him along so quickly that the heels of his undoubtedly expensive Oxfords squeaked on the ageing carpet. He looked like a rag doll in pricey Ralph Lauren, something Claire had hallucinated from one of the many stories lining the shelves around her. Like the father from the  _ Neverending Story _ , or some model from a J. Crew catalogue with a less plasticy smile on his face. One of the few fathers who bothered to set foot in a library - and for that alone, she could justify the way her gaze lingered on him. 

They kept the comics in a far corner of the library, by the reading tables and the doors to the classroom where Claire occasionally taught pottery. One small corner unit that Claire was determined to expand, it was full to bursting with every issue Claire could convince Sylvie to order. A bit harder to maintain than standard books, but they made the children happy, and that was what mattered. 

That happiness clearly extended to Alistair, whose face lit up like a fireworks display when he saw everything they had on offer. Max’s face seemed to light up too, a reflection of a starburst in a windowpane. That was the pattern - whatever made his boy happy made him happy, and by extent bled into Claire, too. Background radiation that seeped into her bones only ever around them, like she’d purposefully chucked off a hazmat suit she didn’t even realize she’d been wearing. She was grinning too, by the time they reached the shelves and started paging through them. 

“Now, are we talking  _ New Mutants _ ,” she asked, “Or are we talking regular old  _ Uncanny X-Men _ ?”

There was obviously a right answer to that question — one Alistair blurted out with enough force to shock Ruth all the way back at the checkout counter. 

“ _New Mutants_!”

It came out in a burst, loud enough that it almost certainly broke the library’s “no shouting” rule again, but Claire let it slide. Primarily because she knew the excitement wouldn’t last too much longer.

“Bummer,” she said, not exactly eager to give him her response. “Someone  _ just _ checked that one out yesterday.” 

She braced for the boy’s face to fall, and it did. That was one thing no master’s degree or training program could ever have prepared her for — the unique kind of disappointment that crossed children’s faces when books were inevitably missing or not available. She’d never get over the way it stuck in her chest to see it, the feeling that she’d failed them, even though she’d done as much as her job required. Crotchety librarian stereotype be damned, it was never fun to see kids disappointed on her watch. 

Luckily, she’d gotten rather good at curbing the inevitable shed of tears.

“But I’ll tell you what: I’ll put a hold on it for you, so you can be the next one to get it as soon as they return it.” 

Alistair’s face paused in its fall, catching itself on a boulder halfway down the cliffside. 

“You can do that?” 

“That I can.” Claire settled a hand on her hip, rather pleased with herself. “And I can call your dad when it comes in, so you can come back to pick it up.”

_ I can call him for a whole host of other reasons too, but that’s beside the point.  _

“But in the meantime, I refuse to let you go home empty-handed.”

She raised her hands as if to perform a magic trick - and in a way, she was. The cogs shifted in her brain, dusting off the part of her with a master’s degree that had memorized every inch of the Alexandria Public Library from top to bottom. She scanned the shelves around their little trio, filled to bursting with any number of things that could live up to Alistair’s expectations. Adventure, horror, drama — as limitless as the adult section, and arguably a hell of a lot more interesting. 

Her eyes bounced off of Max, then rebounded to the shelves, using the stiffness of his suit’s shoulders as a launchpad. They scaled up and down, searching for something she could magic up for Alistair. She had no doubt he’d ravenously eaten up the popular ones even before she’d met Max, so out went  _ The Avengers _ and a whole host of the  _ Fantastic Four _ .  _ The Punisher _ was definitely a no-go, and she was fairly certain that _ Swamp Thing _ might scare him half to death. 

“Do you prefer ninjas or warriors?”

She shot a glance over her shoulder to Alistair, who pondered the question with enough sincerity to make her laugh. This was no laughing matter for a boy of his age, and his eventual answer came with a punctuated tact. 

“Warriors!” 

A boy who knew what he wanted. Claire nodded. 

“Smart choice.”

Her fingers did a conductor’s dance to find what she’d spotted, beyond  _ Iron Man _ and  _ Captain America _ and tucked on the shelves only she could reach. She rocked up onto her tiptoes to grab it, up against the edge of the boots she insisted on wearing to work for her feet’s sake. She nearly regretted choosing from the highest shelf, the way her nerves were determined to crumple her against the ageing hardwood, but she avoided it, spinning back around with a hardbound book in her hands that she gracefully passed to Alistair. 

_ The Legend of Wonder Woman,  _ the cover read _ ,  _ featuring several explosions and leotard-clad heroine with the biggest hair Claire had ever seen. It was a relatively new addition, some independent publication sprung out of the weirdo conspiracy rumors that came up every time something odd happened in the city. Normally, she’d’ve blown it off as nonsense and gone back to sifting through the trades, but it had caught her eye — a warrior goddess, sent from a mysterious island to protect the citizens of Earth with nothing but her wits and a magic lasso. 

People’s brains could be so weird. 

Even then, it was a good read — she’d leafed through more than one issue on her break — and it was a refreshing change from stocking pile after pile of  _ The Mighty World of Marvel _ . It fit Alistair’s prerogative, as far as she was concerned: fantastic adventures, an unbeatable superhero, and enough issues to keep him occupied for days. 

If she got accused of pushing a feminist agenda, so be it. 

Alistair thumbed the pages of the book carefully, the thin paper  _ whoosh _ -ing as he examined the villains set up against Wonder Woman, each one lassoed and  _ kerblam _ -ed into submission with enough style to make Cyndi Lauper jealous. He looked enamored by the colors, if a bit hesitant. 

“But she’s a girl!” He closed the book to examine the cover again, then glanced up at Claire. “Can girls be warriors?” 

He sounded genuinely curious, rather than indignant — like his father — and Claire scoffed. She knew there was a smug expression on her face, but she couldn’t help it.

“Have I got news for you, my man.” 

She settled her weight on one hip and gave him a face that said,  _ you don’t even know the half of it.  _ She watched as his eyes widened, sparkling like something out of a Disney movie. She reveled in that wonder while it lasted; not much longer and he’d turn into a teenager, convinced girls had cooties and that spending time in a library wasn’t worth enough cool points. She straddled that odd line between two points for her job — attempting to convince the growing pubescent side of kids that libraries  _ were _ cool, and that the only thing girls could give boys was a sense of perspective. She was glad to have Alistair’s attention while she could, even if it only lasted for the next fifteen seconds.

She glanced from the boy to his father, attempting to gauge his reaction to her statement. He’d gone from looking at her to staring at the floor, with a blank look on his face that Claire hadn’t seen before. She recognized that far away look on his face, the suggestion that something had grabbed him by the collar and dragged him far away, leaving his body in idle mode until he arrived back. 

He looked pale, and Claire wondered for a moment if she’d gone too far. Worked herself into a corner she couldn’t escape from, all because she’d gotten caught up in the excitement of her job. (It certainly said something about the state of her life that she called  _ that  _ exciting, at any rate.) Had she said something wrong? Max didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d patronize her for giving his son “girly” books — she wasn’t even sure if he was capable of patronizing, considering the deer in headlights look she’d seen him sport so many times. 

At least, she hoped he wasn’t. 

Alistair, on the other hand, seemed completely oblivious — the kind of attitude that, normally, Claire would take full advantage of, if she weren’t waiting for Max to say something that would either confirm or comfort the unease that had crept up and seized in her chest. 

“We need to pick out a new book for Daddy, too!” 

The look on his father’s face seemed not to bother him, the way he wrapped his arms around the  _ Wonder Woman _ book and grinned up at Claire. She raised an eyebrow gently, hoping her sudden loss of composure wasn’t showing on her face. 

“Oh really?” 

Alistair nodded. 

“Yeah,” he replied. “He said you could help us!”

“Did he now?” 

She couldn’t be sure whether Alistair was telling the truth, or whether he was fibbing just to keep her interested, but it felt like a shock to Claire’s frontal lobe anyway. He talked about her when she wasn’t around? Was that why he’d looked pale? Or was she hallucinating?

_ You’re definitely tripping, Claire. You know that office tap water is no good for you.  _

Either way: she couldn’t let Alistair down, now could she?

“Well, let’s see…” 

She wandered away from the corner dedicated to comics, and watched in her periphery as Max and Alistair followed, towards the shelves where they kept random bric-a-brac. Popular releases, reference material, anything that got enough circulation to grant having multiple copies. It was a hot mess, and she knew she was going to have to reshelve _ that  _ too, but she fixed her attention on Max, following Alistair at a distance and looking for all the world like a lost puppy. 

“Does your dad like fantasy?” 

She glanced at the boy as she parked them in front of a random shelf, fiddling with the Dewey Decimal plate tacked at eye level. A random choice, pulled out of thin air, but everything has to start somewhere. 

Alistair seemed unsure — as Claire had expected — and she watched as he turned to his father, looking quizzically at him for an answer. She could’ve just asked Max, but she felt safer going through the boy. Creating a buffer, as he hugged his new loan to his chest and searched his father’s face for the truth. 

Something tensed in Max’s face, then relaxed. Still pale, but no shoulders in his ears, and he wasn’t fidgeting with his rings the way Claire had seen him do before. An improvement she’d take, especially considering the way he raised his eyebrows at his son and shook his head. An over exaggerated, playful motion — the most fatherly she’d seen out of him to that point. 

Alistair turned back to Claire, shaking his own head. She made a show of frowning herself; no sense in not joining the game. 

“Hmm. Okay. Does he like...classics?”

Another overdramatic shake of the head. Claire bit the inside of her lip to keep her frown from breaking as Max played along — he seemed to relax when he focused on his boy, to forget what kind of face he had to put on to keep up appearances. The edges of a smile broke his concentration, and they threatened to break hers too as he looked to her, thoroughly entrenched in the game she’d created. 

“His dad doesn’t read all that much,” he said, “So he thinks he might need to take pointers from the lovely librarian assisting him. What does she like?” 

_ You wouldn’t be calling me lovely if you’d heard what I called the jammed printer this morning. _

She turned her own raised eyebrow on him this time. 

“I think you already know the answer to that, Max.” 

“You said science fiction,” he replied. “I’m not entirely sure if that meant  _ Star Wars _ or  _ Dune _ .” 

“Neither, actually.” She shrugged. Somehow, they’d both flown over her head. “I do like Princess Leia, though.” 

“She’s cool!” Alistair piped up. 

“That she is.” 

Kid’s got taste, she thought. Maybe Wonder Woman wasn’t such a bad choice after all. 

“Did you tell your dad what I told you to?”

She made a vaguely bowl-shaped motion with her hands, closing one eye in an exaggerated wink. It was just about the only way she could wink, and Alistair seemed to get the message loud and clear. 

“Yeah!” 

Great — because if she had to spend one more day staring at Max’s little misshapen creation every time she sat down to read, she was fairly certain her insides were going to melt into a pile of goo. 

“Good boy.” The bowl motioned turned into two embarrassing, static thumbs up. Maybe her  _ brain _ had already turned to goo. “Are you going to come around and help him glaze his bowl?” 

The boy tilted his head, a perfect impression of the owls she sometimes saw in Rock Creek Park when she went out for walks. 

“Glaze it?” he asked quietly. 

Claire nodded.

“That’s how pots get that shiny color on them. You paint them, like you do with a canvas, and then we put it back in the kiln. The glaze is sticky, so it’ll melt all over the bowl and turn all kinds of cool colors.” 

Or warp it beyond recognition and cause it to shatter into a million pieces, she thought. Depends on the day. 

Alistair’s eyes went wide, like she’d just told him some magical secret of the universe. 

“Sweet.” 

Ah, the naivety of youth. Claire missed that. 

“Would you like to try that?” she asked. “Your dad looks like he might need a bit of help with his color choices.”

She made a vague jazz hand-like motion at Max’s suit - more for his benefit than for Alistair’s - and grinned. It sparked something in the boy, who giggled hysterically at the way she quirked a brow in a ‘can you believe him?’ sort of way. 

“Yes!” 

“Fantastic.” She laughed too, the spark flying off of Alistair and lighting something in her own chest too. “She’s all cooled and ready for you on Thursday. If you’re free, that is.” 

A statement made without thinking, a leap made either out of faith or pure stupidity. 

Claire was slowly discovering that, when it came to Max, her decisions were a deadly combination of both. 

She looked at Alistair, their shared thread of enthusiasm tying them silently together. He looked expectantly at his father, who Claire assumed couldn’t say no to that kind of face even on pain of death, raising his eyebrows as if to ask permission. That assumption proved to be true when he nodded, acquiescing with a quiet “of course” as Alistair fist-pumped the air excitedly. 

It was only on pain of professionalism that Claire didn’t do the same. 

She was creating excuses now, writing up scenarios like some twisted, Levi’s wearing Shakespeare to keep him in her life. Finding ways to fit his puzzle piece into her life, despite its oddly shaped corners and the fact that it certainly hadn’t come with the package. Maybe it could replace a different one. One of the ones she’d thrown out, whose corners had been too sharp for her liking. Max’s didn’t fit the pattern, or the shape, but she’d always liked to mix and match. 

She watched him talk to his boy in silence, her brain only half-processing comments about chores and due dates and something to do with Alistair’s mother. She was too busy rolling scenarios around in her head to absorb their words, and probably rightly. There was only so much privacy she could give them without wandering away entirely, and she wasn’t completely convinced Max would be able to make it back to the entrance on his own. 

The librarian in her picked up something about taking home more books as Max ruffled his boy’s hair, and her brain perked up like an excited puppy. Perhaps for the best, she figured, since her other senses had gone awry. They’d rewired themselves, paying more attention than was probably acceptable to the way Max’s suit fit him, and the look he gave her as Alistair took off back towards the comics — still in sight, but leaving the adults to do the talking. 

He looked slightly bemused. It worked on him. 

“You’re an enabler, Miss Diggs.” 

It wasn’t accusatory. More a passing comment, as he moved to rest where she was standing, against a rather pointy set of Stephen King hardbacks. Claire shrugged, some fucked up Pennywise on her shoulder telling her to be a little daring. 

“Only because I know you’ll say yes, Big Shot.” 

She smiled softly, the butterflies in the center of her stomach betraying her. Max seemed not to mind the daring — or at least, didn’t look petrified that she’d walked herself out on a tightrope with no net. Claire was too busy looking at the ground to determine which was which. 

She watched as he glanced over his shoulder, to where Alistair was leaning against a shelving unit, paging through the  _ Wonder Woman _ book — leaving the adults to talk about boring things. His eyes were massive, the shoulder of his hoodie slipping further and further off him the more engrossed he became. Max looked irreparably fond of it, and Claire didn’t blame him. 

“For a librarian, you seem shockingly unbothered that all he reads are comics.” 

“He’s reading something, right?” Claire shrugged, her eyes following Alistair’s hands as he turned pages. “If that brings him back here, that’s fine by me.”

It was the truth. Maybe it was the Youth Programs Director in her talking, but anything that could make a child happy within the walls of her library worked for her. She hardly had the attention span to get through her requisite paperwork anymore, let alone as many novels as her coworkers did, so it wasn’t like she had room to talk anyway. If a kid read  _ The Incredible Hulk _ and learned something about the difference between good and evil, that was enough for her.

“I  _ am _ the hip librarian, after all,” she said. Max nodded. 

“That you are.” 

Gone was the pale deer in headlights. He was no suave businessman, but here was the Max she knew lived under all that Aquanet and stiff fabric. The one she’d seen in shirtsleeves and khakis, talking up a storm about his boy and smiling with that grin she knew could bring a room of women to their knees under the right circumstances. (If she hadn’t been sitting at the time, she probably would’ve proven her own point.) A comfortable, if not content one. A Max she knew she liked. 

“Not many of the  _ un- _ hip librarians would wear Madonna shirts to work.”

He gestured vague to the outfit she’d chosen for the day, and her face flamed like she’d stuck it in one of her kilns. It had been a last-ditch choice to avoid doing laundry, a shirt she’d nicked from Sadie and chopped the collar out of for fun. Better that than her tattered Motley Crue one, she’d figured, but nevertheless. She felt a bit exposed, abnormally cardigan-less and looking like she’d popped out of Teen Beat. If she’d known Max was coming, she would’ve at least had the grace to wear her better-fitting jeans.

“Not necessarily true.”

She twirled a piece of hair between her fingers, glancing down at the liner-rimmed eyes plastered across her chest. 

“None of the other hip librarians get t-shirt castoffs from record labels, either.”

_ Ignoring the fact that Sadie hates Madonna, but still. _

The lucky star stared back up at her, and she could feel the red spreading to her chest, industrial-strength air conditioning be damned. She searched for something to divert her attention to, lest her brain start to leak out of her ears from the heat. Unfortunately, libraries were historically designed to limit stimulus, so all she had at hand was the catalogue she’d memories long ago, surrounding she and Max like thickly-packed bars of a cage. 

Her eyes scanned the shelves at a mile a minute, running up and down spines she knew well, and ones she had yet to meet. It was an interesting bunch, as varied as the crowds on the streets outside. Tall, short, wide, skinny. Colorful, bland, fanciful, plain. The books made wonderful coworkers, and a good support system for a woman currently searching for ways to not look like she was melting from the inside out. 

“Here.” 

Her hands reached out in front of her, grabbing a tiny volume off the shelf seemingly at random. It was a well-loved copy, one she’d seen pass through hundreds of hands in the few years she’d been there.  _ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy _ , said the cover, faded from years of use and more than one page bent from being turned down habitually. The phrase “DON’T PANIC” glittered on the cover, just under a tiny green alien she could draw from memory — considering at least five of the stamps on the checkout card were hers. 

“You said you wanted to know what I like,” she mused, watching as he accepted the book carefully. “And this might be more your speed than  _ Neuromancer _ .”

“You’d be surprised.”

He said with a certain amount of irony, and she wasn’t really sure how to take it. Had she underestimated him? Made him feel like she was talking down to him, just because he didn’t spend hours of his days reading so much it made his head hurt? 

That was about the last thing she wanted. Max was one of the only people she felt like she didn’t have to talk  _ up _ to, paint on an acrylic smile and two-step her way through a conversation with just to get through her day. She loved her job, but being forward-facing was...a lot. And Max, like Sadie, felt just right.

“You, ah….”

She was the one talking like a stuttering car engine now, reaching up to rub the back of her neck like she  _ really  _ wanted to broadcast her embarrassment to Max. She’d gotten good at controlling it over the years, but sometimes it slipped out. Just a bit, when people threw her off — that little girl inside her, the nerdy one who’d rather hole up in a corner with a book than talk to boys because it made her want to melt into the floor. She wasn’t a paranoid person, but the shelves suddenly felt distinctly closer together than they had a few minutes ago. 

“You don’t have to read it,” she said quietly. “It’s silly, really. And I’m sure you’re busy.”

“I trust your judgement.”

The response from Max came quick, like an instinct response — grabbing something as it was falling off the counter, or flinching when someone jumped out at you. His expression didn’t change, didn’t tense or pale as it had before, and she tried hard not to overthink it. The irony was gone, replaced by a conviction she knew must have come from years of working in business. 

“And I think Alistair might disown me if I don’t read _ something _ . He’s rather invested in how I spend my leisure time.”

She knew what the truth sounded like, and right now, it sounded like a man with a nice voice and not-from-around-here kind of accent. 

“Besides.” He shrugged, brushing away a rogue strand of hair that had escaped the Aquanet shell. “Never too busy for you, Miss Diggs.”

_ And is that…? It is! Claire Diggs’s insides come from out of nowhere to take the gymnastics gold! How incredible! _

She was  _ so _ glad Sylvie was on her lunch break. 

“Glad to hear it, Mr. Lord.” 

She shot his own name back at him, even as it felt odd coming out of her mouth. The moniker didn’t fit him — it felt too serious. Like he’d been assigned the wrong name at the hospital, something misspelled on paperwork or mixed up in the office. A name that was just for show, that hid everything that sat underneath it. A name to be printed in neat block letters on a business card, or a billboard, or in the headlines of a newspaper. 

She liked ‘Max’ much better. 

“See you on Thursday then?”

There was something firm in her voice — a wall of confidence to cover the butterflies fluttering so loudly in her stomach she could hear them. It was false, as fake as her customer service voice, but it seemed to work on Max, who hugged Hitchhiker’s Guide to his chest with one arm. She thought she could see a smile creeping its way onto his face, and she was half-convinced she might float up to the vaulted ceiling if it got any bigger. 

“Of course.” 

The smile slipped traitorously onto his face — more of that bemusement that looked so good on him. 

“It’s a date.” 

Claire flushed again, digging her heels into the ground to guarantee she’d remain there. 

_ That it is, Max Lord. That it is.  _

**Author's Note:**

> i am writing maxwell lord as baby and no one can stop me 
> 
> No, seriously. I have yet to see a single Max Lord fic that isn’t just gratuitous porn without plot and/or some kind of reader insert, so I’m filling a void. Who knows how long this piece will stretch, but I’m a gal who loves a villain, and I’m all for redemption arcs if they know they’ve done wrong. (It's about the ~self-loathing~, y'all. Come on.)
> 
> You can find my writing playlist for this project [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6kg1cx7OkVgUW2y0fyLQg0?si=1VbyrZi9TEKMEJrHABrdzA), and you can find me on Tumblr at [ellariasand](https://ellariasand.tumblr.com/).


End file.
